Just to add my 2 cents after a JFK-MAD-NCE RT recently:

Iberia longhaul (i.e. JFK-MAD): Very "adequate". A lot like AA in fact if you are on a 767 except here you are on an A340. FA's are tolerable though not friendly. Food is a notch above AA IMHO, though good luck getting descriptions from FA's beyond "Pasta or Beef". You do get free wine with dinner. IFE is almost non-existant. For an 8 hours flight IFE was one movie shown on a main screen viewable from a handful of seats.

We also experience what others have mentioned here with regard to them giving away confirmed assigned seats for no reason. When we checked in at NCE for our NCE-MAD-JFK return yesterday we were told we had to pickup our BPs in MAD. We were told our window seats (it's a 2-4-2) were confirmed. At MAD, we go to Customer Service where we see our BPs print out as STANDBY!! Then they go away clicking and clacking and after 5 minutes ask what is happening and he just says we'll be more than happy and to be patient. OK. I thought maybe we were getting OpUped to J as Sapphire. Nope.... Finally they print out two seats together in the middle section and they tell us we're lucky they got us those becuase they are oversold. Perhaps we were under the circumstances - circumstances in which they GAVE AWAY our assigned seats despite our checking in at NCE at 12 and in MAD at 2 for a 5pm flight to JFK!


Now the regional service MAD-NCE was wonderful. on a < 2 hour flight a meal was served, service was extremely friendly, the seats comfy, etc. I enquired of a FA why the service was so much nicer than on IB mainline and she smiled and explained that Air Nostrum (which does regional service for IB) operates as ALL BUSINESS CLASS. And it shows (note it's intra-Europe Biz, so standard coach sized seats). Very enjoyable experiences both ways on Air Nostrum.

Lounge in MAD: Very very nice.

Summary: They are OK. Fine. nothing special, not the worst ever. As AA Plat it's nice to have lounge access and priority checkin - but I'd not go out of my way to fly them again. And they really need to learn how to hold confirmed reserved seats - if a passenger has already checked in for the 1st of a two leg flight and it's on time, there's just no reason to give away assigned seats on the connecting flight.