In case you wondered why a 733 or a 734 might appear on your flights. Due to the peak season (+ the extra traffic due to Qatar's situation) , they decided to wet lease 2 planes for a few months (till September).

733 leased from Star Air (South Africa)
734 leased from YanAir (Ukraine)

The cockpit and cabin crew are provided by the two airlines, but each flight also has between 1 and 3 RJ cabin crew who help out with the service,do announcements and deal with outstations staff. RJ crew onboard are there purely for the service side and don't engage in the "safety" side, because they are not certified to operate the 737s.

There is a lot of criticism on Facebook about it, I have flown the South African 733 (reg ZS-TGB) at the start of the week and there was nothing horribly wrong about it. At 19.2 Y.O it's old (especially compared to RJ's otherwise very young fleet), and slightly cramped, but to be fair I found it to be clean and well maintained. The South African crew were quite nice too and you could see they were excited to check out the new destinations because they kept staring at the windows during decent.

Service on those planes is the same as mainline RJ, including meals/ meals presentation, alcohol, pillows&blankets e.t.c. Same goes for the airport handling, no changes here either.

At the end of the day I would prefer to fly on an RJ aircraft (it was nice to break away from the RJ routine though), but I would also prefer to actually end up getting to my destination on-time and without cancellations. I am not familiar with the market for wet leases, so not sure if there were better options available out there.