Review of Alitalia flight from Prague to Rome in Business

Background

This report covers the first part of my journey to South Africa for a bike trip with Alitalia. I booked my ticket for 250 EUR from PRG to JNB returning to CAI in a "special" sale which is so loved.
Immediately after purchasing the ticket well in advance, I went to their Plusgrade program a bided for most of my flights. The minimum bid for this leg was 40 EUR I think. I went for 60 EUR upgrade bid and that was accepted a day before departure, even after I did the online check-in. I read reports that if somebody made the online check-in, their upgrade disappeared but this was not my case. So right now you are going to see and read a short story of previous error fare economy flight upgraded to business. Reports of long-haul flights will come in next days as I am sitting in Casa Alitalia lounge right now ;-)

Prague Airport

Prague Airport is my home town airport and I am really glad about it. It is one of the best airports in the world, hand in hand with airports like Amsterdam or Oslo. Everything is clean, not so big, very well organized, there are not only expensive boutiques but also stores for ordinary travelers and if you know where to go, also restaurants offering cheap great food.
Check-in was very quick as I was the second one in the Priority line.

At this point, I would like to add the information about a new restaurant located in terminal 2. It was always an issue with dining in T2. If you fly outside the Schengen area, then you will fly from T1 where there is a perfect restaurant offering great Czech cuisine at affordable prices. But that is not in T2. There are just two overpriced restaurants with not so good food so if I flew from there, I always packed my own meal. That is over. After opening the new security checkpoint, Prague airport transformed previous space dedicated to this purpose into shops and one of them is Marché. It is that type of buffet restaurant, where you have a lot of options to choose from, you can see everything, it is so nice. I really like it. Prices are a bit higher but we are at the airport, right. So this is it: Marché.

As I was flying business class, it was time to head to the lounge. Lounges are pretty awful at Prague because we have no national airline serving premium customers, Czech Airlines was sold to a low-cost company and they do not mind business customers. So this lounge is provided by bank Erste. Food and drink more than basic so is the sitting area. No view…all in all, this is not a nice business class lounge (Air Canada Signature Suite, where are you?!)… Yes, the photos are covering everything you can find in the lounge. There is nothing more…

Time to board! Boarding was very disorganized, they called for Sky Priority but the Italian passengers did not respect it. Italians… :D

The crew was nice, but not memorable. There were only 2 business class passengers on this flight for 2 rows (8 seats). Economy class had load around 90%. We were given the newspaper and that was it. No welcome drink, nothing more. The floor was really dirty, for the crew who spent 30 minutes between disembarking and boarding was lazy to clean those two tables for passengers…

But once we got in the air (on time) everything ran smooth. The cabin leader asked us for an aperitif, I went for prosecco. Then the lunch was served. I find it bad there is no printed menu so you do not know which meal you are eating, what kind of wines do they have etc. But it all tasted really great, just a standard AZ intra-european business class meal.

After the lunch, I asked for coffee and limoncino. They were not able to offer espresso so at least the American coffee and the cake…

Landing on time, but remote stay. Seems like a standard as there were many A320 and A321 around us with passengers leaving or arriving…