Review of easyJet flight Amsterdam → London in Economy

Introduction

On Friday I received a notification from my company that I will have to position to Birmingham to start my three-weeks shift. Given that Amsterdam is connected with Birmingham with several daily flights I did not expect this to be an issue until operations started to suggest me a 7 am flight to Birmingham with EasyJet as that was the only flight that had a reasonable pricing (KLM was charging prices of over 500EUR). I kindly refused as this meant that I had to position to Amsterdam Airport the day prior to and kindly asked if they had any flights to London available.

About 15 minutes later they came up with a different solution with a flight to London Gatwick at 5 PM, which is probably the worst airport in London to get to from Birmingham. I took matters in my own hand and kindly asked for the 7 PM flight to London Stansted with EasyJet as I would be able to catch a coach to Birmingham from there and was reasonable prices, which they agreed on.

Ten minutes later I received an email with my booking's confirmation.

Check-in

Upon receiving my booking's confirmation from EasyJet, I decided to check-in online and this process is fairly easy to go through, even though EasyJet will try to squeeze some extra money out of you. Seating if not paid is randomly selected and I kind of lucked out with my seat for which I did not pay any penny.

Travel day

On the day of travel, my wife was so kind to drop me off in front of Terminal 3 by car and I kindly went to one of EasyJet's counter to drop my baggage. Given that I was quite early, the friendly ground attendant did not object to it and was kind enough to check-in my luggage and provide me with a proper boarding pass.

Once done with my bags, I moved down to terminal 2 to activate my Privium membership, which I received through my American Express card and does improve your experience at Amsterdam by a lot.

Privium gives you access to one of their three lounges (Landside, Schengen & Non-Schengen), makes you elligible to use business class check-in counters for several airlines, fast track to security and to bypass passport control by using an Irisscan.

Though in order to activate your membership, you will have to make an appointment with them to create an irisscan, which you are able to do so in their landside lounge.

Upon completing all those formalities, I decided to immediately use it and went up to security via the fast track.

I'm impressed with the speed it took me to pass security and border control without seeing any border agent as the Irisscan allows you to bypass it. A whopping two minutes to clear it. I think I set my new personal record with that one.

Given that I used my priority pass to get into the rather disappointing lounges of Aspire on previous occassions, my newly activated privium membership gives me now access to their club lounges. For the non-schengen departures, this is Lounge No. 42, which is pretty close to KLM's Crown Lounge. 

Upon being greeted by one of Privium's attendant, the atmosphere created here is already so much better compared to Aspire's and above all, much quieter.

While the lounge itself is not large, it offers plenty of comfortable seating arrangements from open spaces to enclosed spaces for those who prefer some more privacy.

The lounge also offers a few working stations. There were several more on the other sides with doors to cancel any noise around you.

The open and main seating area.

A separate station was created to grab some coffee, tea or hot chocolate. A wine dispenser was also available here to have some cold white and/or Rosé wine. Red wine was available upon request by the bar.

Food offering was rather limited, but freshly made and of decent to good quality. Though comparing it to Aspire, the food offering here was abundant and generous.

If you fancied some water, beers and/or soft drinks, they were also available on a left stall (not in the photo).

Given that I haven't had any dinner, I decided to grab myself a few bites and a glass of Unoaked Chardonnay.

This lounge gives you also access to shower facilities and a shared bathroom with dedicated toilets to gender.

About ten minutes to boarding, I decided to exit the lounge and slowly make my way to one of the gates at the H pier, while spotting this Airbus A350-900 (B-32CQ) of China Southern preparing for it's flight to Beijing Daxing (PKX) as CZ 346 later tonight

A few minutes later I noticed this Boeing 787-9 (XA-DHM) of AeroMexico that would depart to Mexico City as AM26.

The H Pier (or M Pier if travelling in Schengen) is prone to give you Schiphol's worst experience as this pier tends to be overcrowded, rather hot if sunny weather and will treat you like a flock of sheep, though commonly used by most major low-cost airlines flying to Amsterdam.

OE-LSM preparing for it's flight to Glasgow with our aircraft arriving in the background. The photo also contains an airline I will try out next month as a sneak peek.

H2 was our gate for today's departure to London Stansted and about 50% of the flock of sheeps was already collected downstairs in the gate section, while the other 50% still had to be caught. Yes, I'm one of them!

The hilarious thing is that the boarding card shows you that the gate is closing about five minutes past the incoming flight's scheduled arrival time. I mean it's pretty impressive if you manage to disembark and load the aircraft within that timeframe, though for obvious reasons this was impossible and gate closing was ignored. Just a matter of having people nearby when they do start to board. Boarding was called about 15 minutes prior to scheduled departure though.

Today's flight would be performed by OE-LSO, which is a 1.4 year old Airbus A320neo that has been newly delivered to EasyJet Europe in December 2022.

Upon boarding the aircraft we were kindly greeted by the purser and by now I realized for the very first time that I was given an emergency exit seat and I'm definitely not complaining about it. 

One of the flight attendants came to our row to provide us with a safety briefing regarding the emergency exit, however the briefing she gave to us was rushed, impersonal and inaudible nor did she ask whether one of us wasn't willing to bear this responsibility by opening the emergency door if instructed to do so. To me it felt that she was instructed by one of her colleagues to do it, while being uncomfortable providing us this briefing as she did not make any eye contact with any of us and I don't think many of the other passengers were listening to her.

The cabin however for a 1.4 year old bird was well-maintained, showed no signs of wear and tear and the colour orange was not as present as it is on their older aircraft. Thank god EasyJet decided to stick with the individual air vents.

Boarding was completed about five minutes prior to our scheduled departure time and pushback was engaged about a minute past our scheduled departure time, while rain was about to fall.

Yup…. it didn't take long for that rain to appear.

Luckily enough the rainfall was only a few minutes and by the time we were departing 36L (Polderbaan),  the windows were already clear of any precipitation for our northerly departure.

It took a while before our flight was allowed to make a westerly turn towards the UK.

The table in front of you is rather small and to be fair not really pleasant to use if you want to work on your laptop or so, though it had some ridges in the top as a phoneholder which was working flawlessly for me.

The seatpocket's literature could barely fit on the table though, but contained of a BoB Menu and a safety Card. They did not restock a sickbag on my seat like it had on others. I did not opt to use the BoB Menu and the flight attendants did not have any time to complete the full BoB service with the duration of the flight as Englishmen are notorious for using the BoB service from flights out of Amsterdam :).

About 30 minutes into the flight, we were already descending for our arrival into London Stansted where EasyJet is somewhat of an odd bird given that it is a Ryanair hub.

The landing was nicely performed and quite smooth and with a few meters left to taxi, it was confirmed that we were arriving a whole five minutes ahead of our scheduled arrival time. Disembarkation followed quite quickly after that.

After disembarking the aircraft, we made our way to one of the monorail rides to get us to passport control.

Despite having quite a few people arriving via this monorail, border control took no more than five minutes to clear and luggage was already on belt to be picked up. Nicely done!

While everything was collected, I decided to grab myself some food as I still had about 90 minutes to wait to catch my coach to Birmingham.

While I'm not a massive fan of being on a bus for four hours, I didn't complain much about it as it was well worth the extra hours I got to spend home with my wife. The ride itself was rather pleasant in a quiet coach with just a few people on board and just a few stops in Leicester & Coventry before reaching my destination.

Thanks for stopping by