#13 out of 81 Airlines A minimum of 10 flight-reports within the past two years is required to appear in the rankings.
580 reviews
¡Hola Amigos!
I know it's been quite a while and now I've accumulated three years of now retro FRs…it's been a quite busy couple of years.
Well lets get this through…
So I left you at Doha, and now I have to return home to Bogotá… our schedule was as follows:
So with work done it was time to return home.
We grabbed a cab from Souk Waqif, and we were dropped at Doha's then new airport.
I had tried to check-in early to secure window seats in all segments. It turns out that neither AA, BA or QR let me check in for all flights at the same time and the system was a whole chaos, AA let me have my window seat for free, but BA demanded ransom for the window. Cheap me though thought…whatevs, I'll score a window seat at check in for free.
Wrong, the guy who attended me was of no help. I was stuck to a seat in the middle of the plane. I was quite sour over it…you'll understand on the next report.
Done with the check-in, we went through security and passport control. The first one, quick and painless. Passport control was inexplicably slow…this seemed to be a trend in GCC countries…
And so wer thrown into this odd place with a yellow teddy giant. I felt like in a concept disco bar.
Then we stopped by the duty free to buy some stuff for our workmates back in Colombia. It was a rip off.
Done with the shopping we went off to the lounge to get showered (long trek ahead!) and try to have some chow.
I was warmly welcomed by the dragon and had my shower without issue. After the shower I was out to this boring lounge without any plane views and a bit crowded. I reckon that it was better than no-lounge at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Boarding time came and I went to this filled gate lounge. I couldn't find my tripmate anywhere around. Well I guess we'll meet in London.
The flight seemed to be 80% full, but boarding was orderly. Inside we were met by this radioactive blue interior. I'm still not sure if I like to have this lighting while boarding. I rather have a clear view of my bearings and of where I will leave my stuff.
This 777 was equipped with newer seats than the one that brought us in from Miami
Seats were OK. The IFE was vast and more than appropriate for the flight to London.
The middle seat remained empty and what I assume was a British girl took the aisle seat. She wasn't into chatting, not that I tried otherwise.
After a couple of minutes we were of. Doha Airport isn't much of a spotters paradise. Most, if not all planes were QR metal.
We had a quick taxi to the active runway and we were off.
We were served a box containing a pastry not long after being airborne. The quality was unremarkable. I found the ingredients listed in box more interesting…
Having filled my tanks it was time for some sleep. I woke up above Belgrade… I was dating a Serbian girl back then I thought it would be a cute detail to take a picture while flying above her.
I recall some drink runs took place by then…I was dozing on and off.
But then the smell of food woke me up. We may have been offered a sweet and a salty option. I went with eggs. My standards aren't too high, so it was quite fine in quality and quantity for me.
I tried watching a classic film while having my breakfast. I was trying hard not to fall asleep and miss the approach into LHR.
We came in with the sun… so my crappy camera didn't take the best pics. I was excited as I hadn't been to London since 2000, the President of Colombia was visiting the city then, and they had the Eye lit with Colombia's flag, extra excitement-points. The blue lighting of the cabin did not help for decent pictures…sorry.
Normal lights were on and finally I could take some better pictures of the seats.
We had a smooth landing into foggy Heathrow. Again, excuse the crappy photos.
Upon deboarding we were directed into the maze of the arrivals level of T4.
Stay tuned for the next part, saludos!
My second experience with QR wasn't extraordinary. Maybe the novelty waned and that is why I didn't feel too excited. But in hindsight, they did offer a good soft and hard product. It was at par with EY (at the time).
Doha Airport has impressive architecture but felt fake (if that can be said of an airport), maybe it was my vibe at the moment. The lounge did its job but I expected more at par with the glamour that Gulf States want to portray. BTW, regarding access, I was on a work trip, so my work paid for the cab. But if I were a normal tourist I would have missed public transport access into the airport (this is also true of AUH)
QR was my second Gulf 3 airline. I found it had decent food, service was okay, but it missed some of the cool gizmos EY had at the time (like the neck-designed pillow).
Thanks for reading!
The contributors of Flight-Report published 7 reviews of 2 airlines on the route Doha (DOH) → London (LHR).
The airline with the best average rating is Qatar Airways with 8.3/10.
The average flight time is 7 hours and 26 minutes.
More information
2 Comments
Hola Chibcha, welcome back! Nice to see one of your reports again! I still have several reports that are a few years old that I never got around to posting...and who knows if I ever will, haha. The QR 77W product hasn;t really changed in the last 3 years so your "retro" report is still pretty relevant. And even if it weren't...it's always cool to see how things evolve over the years.
Saludos
Hello, thanks for the welcome back!
Maybe QR is starting to lag behind as competition has loosened a bit?
Login to post a comment.