Shamrock's shortfall
Hi guys and welcome to another Flight Report!
This report will cover a recent day trip to Dublin. Despite having planned a trip to Ireland many times in the past, this would actually be my first time in the country. As for the reason of the trip? It's to satisfy a long-running curiosity of mine. I've known for a while that Aer Lingus sold really cheap tickets on routes between London Gatwick and Dublin, often challenging LCCs like Ryanair and I've always wondered what their service is like on these flights, especially with the price being half (or even a third of) a flight between Heathrow and Dublin on the same airline. That's what we'll be finding out today.
As for the price, the base fare for this flight is €30. For comparison, a Ryanair flight for the same date is around €23 base. Considering the fact that the base fare on Aer Lingus includes an additional bag along with an underseat bag, it's fair to say that this flight is the same price (if not slightly cheaper) than Ryanair.
With the bar set, let's find out how Aer Lingus compares to its low cost competitor!
Flight routing
- 1Ryanair|Economy|London Luton (LTN) → Dublin (DUB)|Boeing 737-800
- 2Aer Lingus|Economy|Dublin (DUB) → London Gatwick (LGW)|Airbus A320
From 2023, I aim to offset all of my CO2 emission from flights. All emissions are calculated using the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator and I will be funding projects approved by The Gold Standard. The CO2 output for this trip is:
LTN-DUB-LGW: 119kg
Total for 2023 (so far): 1566kg
Video report
Yes, I've decided to start a YouTube channel! I've got no idea how active I'll be on there (editing videos takes a lot of time haha) but I'll try to post as many FR as I can in video form (as well as some other stuff). Also I've got no experience editing videos so feel free to give me some constructive criticism as well. ;)
Dublin Airport (DUB)
The bus station outside of the airport. There are direct coaches that shuttle between here and Dublin City Centre. However, I opted to take the local bus as I got the 1 day visitor pass that granted me unlimited travel on buses and trains in Dublin and its surroundings.
The main bus station is located outside of Terminal 1, which is the terminal that most airlines (apart from Aer Lingus) use.
The much newer Terminal 2 is where Aer Lingus and US bound flights depart from and is a 5 minute walk from the station.
The drop off area outside of T2.
The departures for the afternoon. It includes departures for both T2 and T1.
The entrance to the airport.
As mentioned earlier, this terminal is used almost exclusively by Aer Lingus, so they obviously would have the largest check-in and bag drop area.
Some more photos of the check-in area. Check-in is done on self-service machines, leaving the counters for bag drop only. This meant that the whole process took me under a minute for me as I had no checked bags.
Check-in area for United and other US carriers. All US bound flights depart from T2 because US border preclearance is located here.
Another photo of the airport terminal taken from the entrance to security.
Let's head through security!
As you can tell from the photo above, there were barely any queues for security, which meant the whole process took under 5 minutes.
The standard duty free area found in all European airports.
The main departures area - there's a good variety of shops and bars here.
With an hour to go until boarding, lets head to the gates and do some planespotting!
Gates 336-426 are on a pier right next to the duty-free stores, it's also where most long-haul flights depart from and is where US border preclearance is located.
Like the rest of the airport, the entire area is very clean and modern.
The end of the pier.
View out of the window.
Sadly not a lot of traffic in the afternoon (all North America bound flights have already departed).
Nevertheless, there'll always be interesting planes to spot. Like this Aer Lingus A320 in the retro livery (EI-DVM) heading to Milano Malpensa (MXP)
An Aer Lingus A321neo (EI-LRB) that will be heading to Washington (IAD)… sometime in the future. I'm not sure when, but it doesn't look to be anytime soon.
Another Aer Lingus A320 (EI-DVH) heading to Birmingham (BHX)
Aer Lingus (yeah, there's absolutely no variety here haha) A320neo arriving from London Heathrow (LHR).
the flight
Flight time for today will be around an hour and here's our route:
Here's our plane arriving from London Gatwick (LGW).
Some info about our plane:
Type: Airbus A320
Registration: EI-CVC
First flight: 2 February 2001
Age: ~22 years
Config: Y174
Named St Kealin/Caoilfhionn, she was delivered to Aer Lingus in April 2001 and has remained with the airline ever since.
The seats on this A320:
The tray table with the safety card slotted in a clear pocket above.
While the seats are fairly comfortable with padding, the legroom is really poor. It's worse than a lot of LCCs like Ryanair, Wizz and easyJet.
Also it's interesting that they decided to stitch up the seat back pocket, so this seat isn't too different from what you'd find on Ryanair.
At least the seat reclines though.
First views out of the window.
From this point onwards, all photos will be taken from a camera mounted to the window. Sadly the positioning of the camera is slightly off but this will be corrected later on in the flight.
Pushing back around 25 minutes late, this is due to both runways being closed for inspection (the airport doesn't push any planes back during this time).
Taxiing to runway 10R.
View of the takeoff queue as we line up on the runway.
Takeoff! Bye bye Dublin!
Pretty much immediately after taking off, we are already over the Irish Sea.
As there's no seat back pocket, there is only the safety card in the clear pocket above the tray table. Aer Lingus does have a BOB service on this flight but there is no menu available. It's probably available on the Aer Lingus app but this isn't advertised anywhere. All in all, it's really poorly organized.
Pretty soon we're already starting our descent into Gatwick as the sun sets.
The sunset actually looked pretty spectacular however the auto white balance on the camera countered it way too much, which created this rather bland photo.
Here's the same photo taken from my phone for comparison (unedited).
Descending through the clouds.
On final for Gatwick.
Welcome to London! Despite our delay in Dublin, we landed pretty much on time.
A short 2 minute taxi later, we've arrived at the gate.
London Gatwick Airport (LGW)
One last photo of our plane.
In the UK, arrivals from the ROI (Republic of Ireland) is treated the same as domestic arrivals. This means no immigration queues and a much shorter walk to arrivals.
The arrivals area. Arriving at the domestic terminal meant that I got from the gate to here in under 10 minutes (with no checked luggage).
And of course I booked this trip on the one day where there's no trains (Gatwick usually gets a limited service during strike days). This means that all of all of my trips so far this year has been affected by strikes in some way (I seem to be really good at predicting strike days months before they're announced, which I find quite funny).
Another random adventure?
A taxi from here to London would cost at least £50, which would've doubled my spending for this trip. Because of this (and the fact that it'll probably be hours before I even get a taxi with all the queues) I decided to embark on another little adventure: going from Gatwick to Central London… by bus!
9:30PM - After getting lost for a little while, I managed to find the bus station.
~10:00PM - After a half hour wait, a (very packed) bus arrived.
10:40PM - Arrived at Redhill bus station, the very edge of the London Bus Network.
~11:00PM - Bus number 2, a red London Bus that'll take me into Greater London.
11:40PM - Croydon, one of the busiest areas in South London.
11:50PM - Bus number 3, the bus that'll finally take me to Central London. This bus actually takes around an hour so it was about 1AM when I arrived home, 4 hours after landing.
Also, London has some very funny place names (Elephant & Castle being one of them).
That concludes this FR on my day trip to Ireland, see you on another FR soon!
Hi Lia, thanks for this informative report! Haven't seen a recent review on Aer Lingus short-haul until this one and it does not look particularly appealing. As you point out, it is a shame that the short-haul Y product has gotten even worse than LCC competitors like Ryanair with even less space and a worse buy-on-board offer...if you can even find a menu. I get that EI have to compete with FR on home turf, BUT EI also offer a TATL network that FR does not and booking a TATL flight from Europe connecting in DUB is not very appealing when the intra-EU sector has such poor service. I will say I've very much enjoyed EI in Business, but probably wouldn't go out of my way to try them in Y.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Kevin! Thanks for reading. You're right, it's such a shame to see EI's product drop down to this level, although I feel like they're trying to compete on TATL routes with price and convenience (US border preclearance) over actual service. I'm actually quite curious on what their economy TATL product is like and if it's as disappointing as their short-haul product.
Thanks again.
Nice flight report, haven't flown EI in a while so thanks for providing an update to work with. T2 at DUB looks nice, I've only flown out of T1 (but done one arrival into T2). I'll give your YT channel a sub btw :)
Hi Jett! Thanks for reading! Yeah, T2 is really nice, especially with it being so quiet in the afternoon. Flew into T1 on Ryanair in the morning and it definitely didn't look as modern (or as big) as T2. Thanks for the sub btw!