Hi,
After a quiet night in an Airport Hotel at Arlanda Airport, it was still early morning when I arrived at Arlanda's Terminal 5 to check in my luggage for this holiday flight to sunny Greece. I could quickly print my luggage tag at a self service terminal and then drop of the luggage within few minutes. No need to queue at those busy Sunclass Airlines counters as I already did online check in before.
However security control took almost 30 minutes as Arlanda was already very busy this Sunday morning. Once airside I walked throughs some shops and did some spotting.
Soon I reached my gate where this splendid looking brand new A330neo was waiting that has just entered into service with Sunclass some weeks earlier.
Boarding started very early and soon I was greeted by an extremely friendly cabin crew that was in a avery good mood like all passengers just about to take off for their summer holidays.
The cabin was brand new and in perfect shape with some nice boarding music playing and creating a very relaxing atmosphere on the ground.
The seat had a very comfortable pattern, adequate and good seat pitch for this medium haul flight and also a personal TV with an extensive complimentary selection of entertainment.
Next to us a Nordica jet was waiting.
I had pre-ordered a Premium Meal in advance which comes with free coffee/tea and one choice of comlimentary beverage. I was approached by a crew member and therefore given this voucher to present later after service during the drinks service.
Apart from that a menu & some inflight shopping catalogues were in the seat pocket.
A manual safety demonstration followed and we took off perfectly on time climbing out of nice Swedish landscape.
After take off service started with the selling of headphones while I had my own one for the entertainment system.
Mood light was also turned on:
Next the crew passed with the drinks trolley asking for your drink choices. I ordered some sparkling wine with my complimentary voucher and also received an empty cup for the hot drink that would follow later.
Next the crew started to distribute the pre-ordered meals to the passengers. Sunclass Airlines offers a slightly cheaper standard meal that comes more paper-box style (also including a warm dish) and the more expensive premium meal which I had decided for. Almost every passenger on this flight had pre-ordered a meal which really surprised me (ca. 90%!). Most had the standard meal.
The premium meal looked like this with nice metal cutlery:
Great tasting warm bread was offered twice from a basket.
Everything tasted really tasty and it was a great brunch on this nice modern A330.
Coffee and tea were served next by the cabin crew walking through the aisles. All in all the cabin crew was extremely friendly and enjoying their job. I was really impressed and hot not expected this from a charter/leisure airline only offering Economy Class.
A view of the kid's mascottes of Sunclass Airlines and the Scandinavian tour operators it operates for/is owned by. A nice detail for the children:
The rest of the flight passed by quickly with some great views outside.
We banked over the Mediterranean during final descend and touched down on time.
Passing Rhodes old town during final approach:
Once landed we parked on the apron next to another Sunclass A330 classic that has arrived from Norway. The whole apron was filled with many Scandinavian planes bringing in Nordic holiday makers (e.g. SAS or this Novair plane):
Disembarking via stairs onto a bus and some final shots of this great Sunclass A330neo.
Thanks for reading,
FlyAlex
Very cool to see a report on the new Sunclass A330neo! I was surprised when they decided not to install larger recliner seats in the Premium section, but I suppose that they don't really have many very long flights so there may not have been enough demand to do so. Looks like a really nice cabin otherwise with nice space and big modern IFE screens. Really great for a Holiday carriers, and it's also nice that they didn't go for the super-cramped 3-3-3 high-density configuration for Y.
Cool train bonus! That does look like a super comfortable First class cabin and the meal looks really good!
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing! I've wondered recently what Sunclass Airlines service/experience is like following its split from the defunct Thomas Cook Group.
Thanks for your positive Feedback! From what I investigated, Sunclass uses this widebody during summer with this Standard Economy configuration in the whole plane. During winter they convert the front rows with same seats but more pitch and then sell it as a separate Premium cabin. Then in winter this plane is used on longhaul flights, e.g. to Thailand.
Thank you for this very nice report. May I ask you how did you get your ticket ? Was is part of a tour-operator package or did you manage to find a website where just the flight is available ? Thanks for sharing.
Booking this Flight indeed was really tricky! In the end I managed to book the flight only under ‚Flyg‘ on the Webpage of https://www.ving.se/ . Ving is a tour operator of the group that owns Sunclass Airlines. However the webpage is only available in Swedish - so you have to somehow understand/interpret Swedish during the booking process.