WOW air 162, San Francisco International (SFO) to Keflavík International (KEF)
June 10th, 2016
12:50 pm–4:10 am (+1)
Airbus A330-300 EC-MIO
Seats 1H/K (non-existent class)
The gate was pretty crowded, but still had plenty of space for everybody to line up, even well before boarding. A thousand document checks later and they started welcoming people on board.
There were no further bag weigh-ins or anything.
Once we finally made it to the plane, we were greeted with a big surprise: this wet-leased plane had no A/C/H/K seats in row 1, so our assigned seats didn't exist. We mentioned this to a flight attendant, who was profusely apologetic and handed our boarding passes over to the Air Europa purser to find us new seats.
After boarding finished, the purser returned and sat us in 11H/K, the last row of the forward cabin. Seems like the layout of this plane has lots of legroom throughout so losing our extra-legroom seats didn't sting that much.
Seats had neither IFE nor recline, but they did have power and 33 or maybe 34 inches of pitch. Not bad. Granted, this wet-lease was not WOW's own configuration, but why would Air Europa purchase such cheap non-reclining slimline seats and then put so few of them on the plane?
The ceiling had witticisms at each call button, but no air vents.
The plane pushed almost half an hour late, and with a 7h30 flight time against an 8h20 block time, an on-time arrival wasn't looking assured. But who really wants to land at 4 am local time, anyway?
Traffic on taxi was all United all the time coming from the G gates.
That AeroMexico 737 looks mega small compared to the Cathay Pacific 777 in front of it.
After a very slow, very long taxi, the plane finally rocketed into the sky at 2 pm, 70 minutes past scheduled departure. An immediate right turn yielded a view of the Oakland hills.
The seatbelt sign went off ten minutes later, and we plugged in for the flight. The EmPower universal plug immediately deactivated itself as soon as I plugged my US cord in, but worked fine with the Euro plug. Strange.
The crew announced the imminent start of the "bar service" with more deviations from the expected product; the food menu (pictured below) didn't match what was available, and they were accepting most major currencies as well as credit cards.
Other than the safety card, a 76-page glossy shopping magazine was the extent of the seat back literature. The first 58 pages were duty-free shopping, and the menu was most of the last 18 interspersed with ads.
For lunch, we went with the off-menu turkey and cheddar on a pretzel roll along with two cans of Gull beer, for a total damage of 3800 ISK, or about $31 US. Tasty.
After that, six whole hours of not much to report. The seats were comfortable, the crew was super responsive to the call button to sell more merchandise, and the duty free cart had mostly cigarettes and cute hats on display.
There were something like four lavatories for all 270 passengers on the plane and one of them was right behind us, so there was a nonstop line, but we weren't trying to sleep or anything, thanks to the early hour of the flight.
Eventually, the descent started and we saw a lot of clouds, and the first sign of land was only a minute or so before touching down. Taxi to the gate was brief, and the line for passport control was non-existent. We got our bags and found our transfer tickets waiting for us.
The review
I have no regrets at all about booking WOW air. They seem to set expectations well, and I heard no complaints about the amounts people were spending on inflight services. My only worry in future bookings would be about product consistency, both soft and hard: if they can't even deliver what they've sold, what then?