Originally Posted by Traveloguy
Apologies. I certainly had no intention of making my post seem to heated! Must be the phase of the moon!
... Again, apologies if you felt my post was seen as a personal attack as it certainly was not intended to be!
Apologies of course accepted
. As I said, I was sure that you had not meant to be 'tetchy', the post just happened to read that way !
Originally Posted by Traveloguy
Ouch! I would never have expected an A320 operating on that route
Yep. Was not fun.
Originally Posted by Traveloguy
I do however feel that regional European flights (& to North Africa) possibly has the worst service in the world. In general carriers provide little or no IFE...
On this point we are in agreement - thank god for the iPod indeed !
QF have IFE on 1-2h flights, and indeed so do the likes of SAA, plus as you say many Asian carriers. But on our case in point a 2-3h flight is quite a different matter from a 5-6h one, espec. when your rivals (and OW partners) provide personal screen IFE on their equiv. flights.
And on the other point even on the 3 hour BA Euro services the J cabin is clearly differentiated from Y, and is a vast improvement from IBs equiv. J - meal service I generally think is great (love the BA / Royal Doulton tea cups !), and as long as you are sitting on the left of the cabin (
) or in the front row you have a lot more space etc. A far cry from IB.
As for your observations re. the LON-TLV route, the 'large' (less than 0.005% of the British population !) Jewish population factor is of course a part of it, but only a small-ish part. Many such paxs. are in Y (with many other tourists on the route), yet BA have the 3 cabins due to brisk business travel etc (and not just from the UK). I think the bigger issue may be the competition factor - BA need to provide a proper service as they are up against ElAl etc etc on the route. IB have a relative monopoly... and prob. believe that by having such a basic service they can charge cheap prices and attract budget pax. to buy connecting flights with them from other Europe hubs as a consequence.
And its not like IB are not running a J service on the route - they are, its just an insult for one. There must be more than a little premium class business to and from the Middle-East from Spain etc... and maybe they would attract more of it if they actually provided a real J service.
As for the times BA flew 767s on the TLV route, this is why I wrote about 'usual circumstances' ! When there is war/Intifada (but not a bad enough one for them to temp. drop the route altogether [i.e. Gulf War I]) the demand drops significantly and they
temp. stick on awful (IB style !
) aircraft on the route. My point is that IB do it all the time !
Finally...
Originally Posted by Traveloguy
I do feel however that it seems many people go on an IB flight expecting things will go wrong and often things do go wrong largely because people go in with that negative attitude - i.e. it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
... maybe you had read my post assuming I was just such a person ?!?
Seriously, its a fair enquiry, but I can assure you this was not the case with me - I arrived to fly with them in a positive frame of mind as they always upgrade me, and then had this terrible experience. It was a disgrace... and I'm now voting with my feet. Its bye bye IB for me.