Review of Transavia flight from Paris to Amsterdam in Economy

Introduction

My friend was over in Paris from a far away country and asked for a meet up to catch up for old time's sake, I decided to do so and started to search for some decent tickets. While Paris is easily reachable from the Netherlands by either car, train or plane, I of course opted for the plane as it's probably the cheapest option too as the TGV would've costed me about 260 euros (return), while KLM and Transavia offered me a return ticket for about 150 euros in total (excluding luggage). A car was really no option as I had no mood to drive for about four hours.

So here's the start to the journey of our fellow French reporters with a flight that is probably very very familiar for many of them with a flight of KLM from Amsterdam to Charles de Gaulle and the return would be on Transavia Holland from Orly to Amsterdam.

Paris Orly Airport

It was time for me to return home and for this one I decided to travel back from Orly to Amsterdam which is a route being only served by Transavia a (few flights by Transavia Holland and a few by Transavia France). As I was staying a bit north of Paris and I wanted to leave as late as possible for Orly, I decided to order myself an Uber who brought me in approximately 45 minutes (including traffic jams) for a mere 40 euros to Orly (which I consider cheap as taxi's in the Netherlands are ridiculously pricey).

After a ride of 45 minutes by my driver, I was dropped in front of Terminal 3 today as my flight would depart from here. A nice advantage of departing at these times is that airports tend to be rather quiet.

Entering the terminal will bring you into a large open space with a lot of check-in stands who seemed not to be working for the Dutch part of Transavia as I tried to obtain my boarding pass in paper format and kept telling me to visit one of the desk agents. I gave up and decided to stick with my mobile boarding card.

Security took longer than expected as only two stations were open and I was done with my security check after approximately ten minutes and proceeded myself towards the gate area.

I'm not a huge fan of crossing duty free shops on my way to gates like I told many times, but Orly is absolutely joining that team to force passengers to walk through them.

Bought myself a sandwich just before closure as I  was pretty hungry for not having eaten a bit for a period and seated myself on one of those seats. Yes, they are pretty comfy and do have power sockets, however the plants should've been trimmed down as it was annoying many passengers.

About five minutes ahead of our original boarding time, I proceeded myself to Gate E19 from where my plane would depart from. When I passed a Boeing 777-200ER (F-GSPN) who's being pushed back for a flight to  Saint-Denis (RUN).

And two Air Corsica birds who were about to be ready for their flights. 

And finally our ride to Amsterdam who was already busy boarding for their flight to Amsterdam.

Our flight would be performed by PH-HXE, a 3.5 year old Boeing 737-800 that has solely flown for Transavia Holland would perform our flight to Amsterdam and I was one of the last ones to board.

Window view from my seat

HV 5194

Legroom was far from great and I would not understand how someone would enjoy a flight of like 3 or 4 hours in such a configuration, which Transavia often performs to destinations in Southern Europe and even to Dubai. I barely managed to sit straight, while my knees were in the back of the seat in front of me. Luckily enough the middle seat remained free and I was able shift my legs.

The content of the literature in my seat pocket contained of a sickbag, a safety card, Transavia's magazine and a BoB menu.

Our overhead panel with airvents, though it remained hot in the cabin and it felt like there was literally no flow coming down from the air vents too.

A look of the famous greenish cabin of Transavia with a Boeing sky interior…. I'm not sure that blue is really matching with this colour of a green.

A Norwegian Boeing 737-800 was being pushed back and we followed them shortly for our departure.

Soon after the manual safety instructions were performed, the cabin was dimmed and soon we were on our way to RWY 24.

We were airborne about 17 minutes past our departure time as there were quite a few airliners departing and landing, but unfortunately our flight did not give us much of a view of Paris at night as we disappeared into clouds soon after rotation.

Soon after we reached a safe altitude and flight attendants did show up to start with their Buy-on-Board service, which I did not use. The menu however will be shown in the gallery right below here and I think the prices are reasonably priced and often cheaper than airport shops.

About 40 minutes into our flight, the first officer check us in giving us tons of information about our departure route, take off mass and our arrival procedure in both Dutch and English and it took him a solid ten minutes to complete it and from there we had ten more minutes for our landing on the usual runway ''18R'' (also known as the Polderbaan), which meant a long ride to our gates.

Touchdown.

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

After a long taxi to our gate, we soon docked and it took a while for the cabin to clear as I was one of the last passenger to deplane the aircraft as the person next to me was occupied with her kid and people in the back did not give her time to grab her bags as everyone tried to rush for no apparent reason. With no checked luggage, I was soon off to my car and back home!