Welcome to this Fight Report Series!
BACKGROUND
This summer I was travelling with my family to Iceland and Venice for a few weeks. Iceland is somewhere I always wanted to go to, and I am very exited to finally be seeing that country. My Mom really wanted to go to the architecture biennale in Venice and I found a really cheap flight VCE-JFK via IST on TK for $377 per person. After Venice I will be joining my family on my Dad's side for a week long beach holiday at Bethany Beach, Delaware. After that I will be returning to SFO (or OAK, actually) on WN from BWI. To clear out any confusing IATA codes HFN is Höfn, a town in southern Iceland, and FEI is a small Icelandic domestic carrier called Eagle Air (it doesn't have an ICAO code). RKV is Reykjavik's smaller domestic airport. Here is a map of my routing from gcmap.com (excluding my one domestic flight from RVK-HFN):
Here is my domestic flight:
Here is my routing:
SFO-BOS VX352 Y http://flight-report.com/en/report/16114/Virgin-America-VX352-San-Francisco-SFO-Boston-BOS
BOS-KEF FI632 Y HERE
RVK-HFN FEI742 Y Coming Soon
KEF-DUS AB3929 Y Coming Soon
DUS-VCE AB8762 Y Coming Soon
VCE-IST TK1870 Y Coming Soon
IST-JFK TK003 Y Coming Soon
BWI-OAK WN565 Y
This one-way ticket from SFO-KEF on 6/20 cost me $467 each. I thought this was a good price if I only paid as much as I did for the return. This would mean that a SFO-KEF, VCE-JFK in the summer would be only $844
FLIGHT REPORT
First I want to apologize for the fact that some pix are rotated incorrectly. It happens all the time when I use an iPad. Does anyone know how to fix this? Thanks in advance!
My plane today will be TF-FIC, named "Magni". Here it is courtesy of planespotters.net
I will start this FR from the point after I have cleared the byzyntine maze that is BOS. Usually, I dont cover airport lounges in my FRs, but I will show you around the AF/KL lounge in the international departures area of BOS. I was travelling with my Mom who has Priority Pass which gets her into lounges at over 700 airports around the worlds, better than any FF progarm can get!
Press offering, lots of french newspapers/magazines however english selection is somewhat limited so I read my own book.
The food selection is mediocre, pre made soups and cold snacks of doubious quality. The hot drinks are OK though.
My selection, minestone soup and a cookie (its OK but not great)
FIDS in the lounge. When I ask the lady at the desk how long before departure to board she offered to make a special announcement for my flight. First class service indeed! FYI I am on the 8:45pm flight to KEF
Again, I want to say that the lady at the front desk was great. Besides her boarding announcements she aso let me borrow her pen!
More lounge pix. They have vintage and modern AF advertising decorating the lounge
Unfortunatley I lost all the photos covering the time between my exit from the lounge and boarding :(
Boarding the plane:
Upon boarding, I am given a bottle of water. Nice Gesture!
FI likes to brand everything, and I mean everything. they like to publicise their stopover program a lot, like on these pillows.
"Time to start dreaming about your Icelandair stopover". It also says that on the headrest
Contents of the seatback pocket:
Look at what it says on the airsickness bag!
AvGeeks, You have been noticed – probably to the dismay of some FI cabin crew lol.
They also have advertisments for Iceland tours
During boarding, the IFE screens are playing fun facts about Iceland and advertisments for the Search and Rescue services and Icelandair:
They were saying that 95% of all Icelandinc homes have internet and that a new island was formed in the 1960s by volcanic activity!
All you will ever need to know about Icelandair boarding music:
The IFE start screen:
The IFE home screen (You may notice that it says we are en route to YVR. This is an embarresing malfunction):
Despite being pictured upside-down (my bad), the IFE is great. Modern hardware, easy to use touchscreen and interface, and great selection! Definitley on par w/ TKs newest software and hardware (which I will detail in my TK003 FR). This is more than enough to keep me entertained for the flight time!!!
After takeoff, drink service is commenced, it will be a tea for me:
I payed $12 for a prepayed BoB meal. Here it is as delivered (with some pretty cool packaging):
Once I unwraped the packaging, I realised the meal was waaaay to small:
Was I supposed to pay $12 for this??
I bought some Skyr (Icelandinc yoghurt that is really good) from the FA. Unfortunatley, I dont have a photo of it.
The lav was very clean:
Random mid-flight pic:
Beautiful Greenland scenery at sunrise:
Flying over Greenland:
Moving Map is quite good but not exceptional. It just flipped between thesse two screens and zommed in at its own will when displaying the map. Not quite as good as VX:
Beautiful Sunrise:
This calls for another cup of tea to wake me up!
Daylight finnally reachs the very dark cabin:
Shortly after our wonderful scenery, we begin our descent into KEF. Atfirst, I thought that we were in zero visibility, but it turns out that all over Iceland, there are very low hanging clouds.
We broke out of the clouds and could finnally see beautiful Iceland!
We land in Reykjavik on time.
Planespotting at KEF:
After deplaning using stairs, I say goodbye to TF-FIC
KEF is doing very well considering how quickly tourisim is growing in Iceland. Immigration was very quick! However, we realised that our bags had been lost (long story, but it wasn't FI's fault it was VX and BOS). The baggage office was efficient in handling us, but not in handling our bags. It took a whopping three days to reunite us with our bags yet we got no compensation.
Thanks for reading and please drop me a line in the comments section
CONCLUSION
Icelandair is a great airline to consider when crossing the Atlanctic! They have great prices and a good product. Hard product is on par with most legacy carriers if not better (new IFE screens come to mind). The crew are also very friendly and happilly shared Iceland travel tips with me! With FI you also get a very good baggage allowance (2 bags in Y when flying to/from North America). BOS is terrible (see my VX352 FR for more bellyaching). Howver, KEF seems to be doing a reasonable job growing with Island's tourisim industry. The only things that made me rate KEF bady are the delay in returning my bags and its inconvienient location (Very far from Reykjavik. The land between KEF and the city has nothing on it so they should probably build an airport there!)
Thanks for this flight report!
I believe you could edit the picture and rotate it to the desired orientation. After that just save and you're done!
Thanks for the advice!
Thanks for this FR.
SFO to KEF at 480$ is indeed a good price for the summer season.
Yeah, I found it on hipmunk. It was the same price for a direct flight on WW, but their A330 wasn't yet out so I didn't want to take any chances with there not being IFE for a 9 hr flight or diasatouous seat pitchs (it turns out that WW 330s do not have IFE).
Hello MrMax!
I loved the airsickness bag. They're geniuses! That's an important detail for someone like me, who collects as much "aeronautic memorabilia" as possible from each flight. :D
As for you rotated pictures, you only need to do some minor editing on a PC. Any respectable image editing software will have a "rotate" feature. You don't even need to download expensive software for that. IrfanView, for example, is good quality free software, and you can rotate your pictures by clicking on Image > Rotate (left or right), and then saving your file. ( www.irfanview.com ). You also have GIMP, which is much like PhotoShop, but open and free. It's more complex than IrfanView, though. ( https://www.gimp.org/downloads ) (Click on "show downloads for..." and choose your operative system)
Thanks for sharing :)
The airsickness bag really cracked me up! I regret that I didn't save it!!! Thanks for the advice!
Hey Max. Like Nechus said, you need to rotate your pics on a computer before uploading them. I don't recommend uploading directly from a smart phone or tablet.
Yikes, those are some tough grades for BOS and KEF. Having flown through both many time (probably over 50 times) I find them both to be decent airports, especially KEF. Yeah, it's a little far from the city, but then again I live in DC and IAD is just as far. Otherwise KEF is a convenient little airport for connecting flights. In and out easily and immigration is always a breeze
Kevin, Thanks for your advice on pics and your construcive disagreement. The agents at KEF were very inefficient with reuniting me with my bags which explains the critical rating, but other than that KEF is great (especially if connecting I suppose)! BOS just seemed old, dirty, and dilapidated (exept for the international terminal). Changing terminals was especailly a nightmare (I guess you could call it a behind the scenes tour of baggege rooms, a B6 training centre, and lots of electrical wiring)!
You are right about most terminals at BOS, but FI leaves from International Terminal E, which is pretty decent IMO. Sometimes it takes a minute for comments to show up depending on browsers. After posting, if you click on the comments icon in the top right corner of the page, you can see that your comment has been posted.
Hi! I am having some difficulty responding to comments (It never shows my replys!) Help!
never mind :)
Don't worry. We can see them. :) I have also noticed that it might take some time for my replies to show on my own screen. This has been solved only when I close and open my browser and access flight-report.com again.
Thanks
Thanks for this FR. A very interesting one, for sure.
What was the flying time between BOS and KEF?
I was under the impression that Icelandair would give out some kind of complimentary meal, but I suppose not!
Nice to see a functioning IFE system, too!
Cheers.
Glad you enjoyed my FR!
Flight time was supposed to be 5 hours, but the captain announced 4 hours 30 mins. I think TF is like TK in that they have an annoying policy of adding 30 mins to the flight time.
Icelandair is actually widely regarded as a LCC, although it is the national carrier of Iceland. Until the likes of WW and DY, it was the cheapest way to fly transatlantic.
Yep, The IFE was great! More than sufficient for 5 hours, or even 10 hours! Definitley on par if not better than TK, but not anything like what you get on EK.
Thanks for dropping by!