Review of Transavia flight from Salzburg to Rotterdam in Economy

Hello everybody,
Netherlands is one of my favourite countries so when I found this 38 € ticket to Rotterdam I decided to try Transavia. The AF-KLM-owned airline usually offers cheap tickets to/from France and the Netherlands, and I only heard positive opinions about them. But for this week they only had quite costly fares for flights departing from my hometown, Budapest, that’s why I flew from Northern Austria. I didn’t regret that because I had the possibility to try a new airport. Also I love Salzburg.
After arriving from the Hungarian capital by train we had a connection to the airport from Salzburg Central Station. I was surprised because the local airport shuttle was a trolleybus, and it was really fast and modern. That was nice to see some beautiful streets in the town along the way. The ticket was 1,60 €. The airport (which is obviously named by W. A. Mozart) has two relatively small terminal buildings and a huge, expansive parking zone.

It started to rain but it was still possible to visit the observation deck (it’s free of charge) from where we had a great view over the apron so I took some photos of the planes.

PH-HSC, our ride for that day.

The main terminal building (T1) was a little bit crowded although April is off-season. The place is quite simple but modern - you don’t need too much time to discover it. There are some nice cafés, bakeries and restaurants.

After we got through security control we had a couple of minutes at the duty free shops where we crashed into a wide choice of sweets, so we almost missed the flight but we bought a pack of an Austrian speciality. This small waiting area also has a cozy café which is very popular.

Our flight was departing from Gate 1 (there are 7 gates). Boarding started 20 minutes prior to scheduled departure time. No one was missing so the airport crew managed to finish boarding on time. The plane flying today to Rotterdam was a B737-800.

The friendly flight attendants welcomed us, and they didn’t check our boarding pass when we got onboard which surprised me. Flight load was approximately 90%. The cabin was in a quite acceptable condition with Transavia’s regular green seats. I had a window seat (6F). Unfortunately we weren’t able to enjoy the view of the Alps after take-off because of the foggy weather conditions. In my opinion, legroom was quite good compared to other low-cost airlines.

We took off at 15:35. The captain announced a flight time of 1 hour and 35 minutes while the green-uniformed cabin crew started to offer meals. Transavia has buy-on-board service with a fairly wide selection of sandwiches, snacks and drinks. We purchased a hot sandwich, a Spanish meat selection named Tapas bar, some coffee and a sparkling water. All in all, we were satisfied of the quality.

Meantime we started our descent to Rotterdam/The Hague airport during which we had some spectacular views of the clouds. When I saw lakes and canals everywhere I knew we would reach our destination soon. That was also great to see the tiny Holland towns from above.

We landed at 16:53, 17 minutes before scheduled arriving time. Actually, the airfield didn’t have a lot of traffic: there were only two Transavias and one Cityjet aircrafts plus ours. The baggage-belt area is classy:

There was a construction going on next to the terminal building, so it was a little bit tough to find the appropriate exit and catch the shuttle bus to the city centre, but we luckily managed.