Review of Vueling Airlines flight Palma De Mallorca → Bilbao in Economy

Hello, and welcome to my second trip-report on FR! Go check out my first one here.


ADEU, MALLORCA


After a lovely week of travelling (and eating!) around Mallorca, with the help of my mom's old friend from school, it was, sadly, time to head back to the cold and grim Basque Country. Having said goodbye to her and her husband the day before, we catched a cab from our around 3:30pm, heading straight towards PMI.

Taxi ride:


Legroom was… decent.


We arrived at Departures around 4:00pm. As it was too early to check, we opted to wait for a while at a nearby Costa Coffee. It had Wifi, something I really, really needed considering I had accidentally wasted my entire data plan during the whole trip. Whoops!

Departures area:


At around 6 o' clock, we headed past security down to our gate… too bad it wasn't avaliable yet! We sat down right in the middle of the D concourse, waiting for our gate to appear on the nearby FIDS screen.



Model planes exhibit, between the walkways. Almost none of those airlines exist anymore!



Half an hour later, our gate finally appeared: D92, which was occupied by a Tuifly Boeing 737-800, D-ATUI, carrying a lovely "Robinson Club Resorts" livery:



Our next door neighbour was Ryanair's EI-EFP, carrying an important message for the Britons - methinks they didn't see it:



Meanwhile, our gate was filling up - but not with the type of passengers you'd expect on a domestic Vueling flight! A good chunk of them were, undoubtly, German. We thought that maybe Bilbao was just a popular destination with the Deutsche - why would they be heading to a plane that's so clearly parked and out of service? I mean, the signs still featured our flight, so…

Two hours later, me and my sister went to grab a bite at the nearby Burger King, and on our way, we discovered the reason why our gate wa a bit too on the German side:



Yup, gate change!

After getting our food, we headed over to our mother to give her the news and head over to D90, where we secured some seats next to the jetway access, and I munched down on my Whopper™.



THE FLIGHT

At around 7:50 pm, our plane arrived: 3-year-old EC-LVO, a 320, and not long after that, a rather hectic and disorganized boarding process commenced:



Luckily, unlike the arrival flight with Air Berlin, my seat was in a much better condition, and featured some nice legroom to boot:



With a delay of at least half-an-hour, EC-LVO took off from PMI at around 8:10 pm. Once the seatbelts signs were off, I took a small trip to the bathroom, which was nice and spotless:



The flight, almost full-house, went smoothly, with most of the passengers snoozing off:



We began our descent into Loiu at 9:45. Now, while most of the flight had been uneventful, landing was a whole different story. We had an insane amount of turbulence, so much that it felt like a roller coaster ride! My mom was praying to the heavens, while I was trying to ward off some nasty headaches caused by what I assumed was blood pooling up in my brain. The pain was almost similar to that of a cluster headache - not much fun at all! Thankfully, that was all over once we arrived at BIO at 9:50 pm, being the last flight of the day at the airport.

After grabbing our bags, we waited at a almost empty and quite cold arrivals area, waiting for our bus to San Sebastian to arrive:



We hopped onboard around 10:25, and just like that, our trip to Mallorca was over…