The flight was fine but nothing exceptional. They did serve champagne before and during the flight, there were no pyjamas or amenity kits as expected for such a short flight (the crew said they did have them on board but they were for the return sector back to Dubai).
Cabin was mainly empty, our group of 5 plus another 5 or so in a cabin of 35 seats. We had a delay due to tropical weather systems so the flight was closer to an hour as we flew quite far south first before turning east towards Cambodia. Priority baggage was correctly handled and came off first (mine was the very first bag off for the first time ever, and the rest of the party had their bags within 5 minutes).
It’s worth noting that there was an error about the chauffeur service when we booked - the lowest fare class said no chauffeur service and the one up from that said chauffeur service included as both ends. We booked the one up as we wanted lounge access which wasn’t on the lowest fare, and the app later invited us to book the chauffeur at both ends. Of course, it isn’t actually included in reality and the Emirates website says on a different page that flights between BKK and SAI and BKK and DAD in any business booking class do not include chauffeur service.
An aside, but an important one: the Qatar lounge at BKK far outranks the Emirates one, on a scale of 2 (EDIT: okay, maybe a 2 isn’t fair, let’s go with 4/5) for Emirates if Qatar was a 10. Emirates have spun the BKK as their largest outside of Dubai and multi million dollar investment and so on, but compared to Qatar:
- no a la carte options, buffet only
- only regular champagne, no rose
- staff didn’t really understand any of our questions and largely just stood around, compared to Qatar where every single person we interacted with was friendly and more importantly knew what they were doing
- self pour only, no bar, so no cocktails compared to a full bar service and cocktail menu in the Qatar lounge
- not enough showers for the number of people considering they use an A380 multiple times
H
