Royal Brunei - London to Darwin (Return)
Written: Apr 04 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good food, decent servings
Drinks served regularly
Newer planes have good entertainment selection
Competitive price
Cons: Some very old aircraft still in use.
The Bottom Line: Recommended. Given price, service and quality of flight. Unfortunately they have at least one old plane. I'd probably have said this company were above average if it weren't for that.
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| scaryant's Full Review: Royal Brunei Airlines |
My girlfriend and I recently flew this airline from London to Darwin (Australia) and return. We picked them because they have quite a good name in Darwin for being an affordable and good airline to fly with (particularly out of Darwin).
In short our experience was mixed, we were initially apprehensive about flying with them after reading some mixed reviews, then found we were pleasantly surprised with the first set of flights.
General flight overview
Generally the flights were good, although overall I would give Royal Brunei a 7/10. The service was fine, food/drink was decent and regular and in-flight entertainment was good (most of the time, read on)
My one major complaint with the flights was our Brunei to London (return) leg.
As mentioned in some other reviews, this plane was a very, very old Boeing 767. The seats were practically falling apart, threadbare and carpet was old and worn. This plane was that old, we saw an engineer screwing an armrest together as we boarded. Another indication of age was that there were cigarette trays in the arm rests.
As for the "entertainment" well there was very little to be entertained about. For the first leg, the flight was 100% full and the seats we had (for 8.5 hours) had no working headphone jacks and no working call button so we could tell someone! There was no individual entertainment units so you had to watch the one and only "big screen" at the front of the plane which was a RGB projector – picture was faded and blurred. Some seated sections had permanent TV screens bolted to the roof - but in all there would have only been 4 or 6 of these and no more than 32 inches.
Luckily on the third leg from Dubai to London the plane wasn’t full, so we were able to ask to move to seats with working headphone jacks.
Entertainment
On the newer air bus planes, the seats had individual entertainment units and the selection of movies available was decent, however I was surprised to see some of the older Bond films (70's, 80's & 90's). The games were not that great, but I wasn't really "in the zone" for them anyway.
There seemed to be some teething problems with the newer in-flight entertainment system which the crew tried their best to resolve - albeit there's not much that can be done aside from reboot the unit. The units seemed to freeze and then some would not respond to a "reboot". Luckily as the flight was empty on the way to Darwin, we were able to move to another seat. However we had to do this again after one of the other units also stopped working. Other people experienced the same problem as well.
The headphones provided on one flight were the best “throw-aways” I’d ever seen on a flight. These were fully adjustable, Phillips headphones which were very comfortable.
Food
The food was good, in fact I'd even say by airline standards the food was excellent as was the service. Some meals seemed to be at strange times (what seemed like breakfast for us was a hot rice/meat dish) however, when you're following the sun - what you have when doesn't really matter. The selection was not bad, Asian influence mostly and some western style (scrambled eggs/omelette for breakfast etc)
They were also very good with drinks, of course no alcohol however they constantly serve soft drinks, juice and water throughout the flight.
Transfers
The transfers were reasonably well organised, it was good breaking the flight up into 8 hour stints. The stop-over at Dubai was short, ~45 minutes both ways. The longest stop-over was on the Dubai to Darwin route where we stopped in Brunei for about 8 hours. This was fine with us as we’d booked a hotel near-by the airport and had a shower and a sleep.
It should be noted that the airport at Brunei is terrible. Minimalistic and poorly staffed were the main features. When we returned to the airport after sleeping off some jetlag two hours before our flight, we were required to wait outside in the check-in hall until 30 minutes before our flight. Initially we thought this was because there was no staff, however they were there but for some reason wouldn’t let us go through immigration to the airport lounge area.
Once through, none of the shops or duty free was open so we couldn’t buy water or food. The small duty free shop (basically perfume/chocolates) opened briefly only to close promptly when passengers showed disinterest.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
scaryant
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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