Better than BA as far as I'm concerned...
Written: Dec 06 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: lovely staff
refurbished planes are great
seat back entertainment is brilliant
great food
Cons: Brunei airport a bit quiet
the older planes are not as impressive
The Bottom Line: Amazingly good service for the price - nice little touches like free newspapers and hot towels provided.
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| jenncatt's Full Review: Royal Brunei Airlines |
Flew Royal Brunei Airlines in November '08 London to Perth, via Dubai and Brunei, and had read such awful reviews online that we were dreading it.
Could not have been more wrong - we had the new refurbished planes for most of the journey, with fantastic VOD entertainment systems (these worked fine the vast majority of the time) and a good selection of films/music - certainly much better quality than the last BA flight I had last year. Seats were comfy, and the 3-2-3 arrangement means much more room in general.
The staff were wonderful - polite and friendly, nothing was too much trouble. We were travelling with a family member who needed a wheelchair, as did several other passengers, and they looked after us fantastically.
The food was great as well - quite a wide variety of stuff, and lots provided. My dad announced that the beef curry was one of the best he'd had anywhere, let alone as airline food.
Some people don't like the fact that this is a dry airline, as Brunei is Islamic - quite frankly this seems to make for a quieter journey and didn't bother me at all. My dad bought a couple of mini bottles of spirits to take on board (which they are fine about) but didn't even end up drinking them in the end. Incidentally, my sister flew to Perth with BA a week later and ended up being subjected to a tirade of abuse from the drunk passenger sitting behind her, to the point where he was banned from his onward flight in Singapore.
The only niggles we had were that Brunei is a pretty quiet place to spend a few hours waiting for a connecting flight (although they do have a cafe with free wifi and plug points so you can while the time away pretty well with a laptop) and they have the security check point directly on the gate. The international liquid restrictions are in force, so you can't take any liquids more than 100ml on board for the Brunei to Perth leg or Brunei to Dubai leg. This puts paid to any duty free bottles you buy in Aus on the way home as far as I know, and also means you can't take bottled water onboard for that leg, which was a bit of a pain.
We had one of the smaller, older planes for the Brunei - Perth leg on the way there, which wasn't as nice as the new planes. The seats are arranged 3 - 3 so there is less room and no seat back screens. The overhead screens aren't great, and the aisles are incredibly narrow to the point where traffic jams were building up as people tried to move around. Luckily that was only for 6 hours but the longer flights would be much harder to get through on one of those.
Other than a couple of small niggles, it was a fantastic service for the very cheap price, to the point where we all walked off the plane talking about how great they were. Such a pleasant surprise, and such a relief after all those other reviews!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jenncatt
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Reviews written: 1
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