Any fans of Iain Banks in or within reach of Brussels may like to know that he is speaking at Scotland House, Rond Point Schuman 6 (top floor) on Tuesday 29 January at 13h. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance from brusselsevents AT scotland.gsi.gov.uk – thanks to
As luck would have it, that is the same building as my office, so I will certainly be there!
(And I suppose in a way this continues the theme of Scotch whisky from my post yesterday…)
I’ve just done two long-haul Qatar Airways flights in the last two days; service was good, though not particularly remarkable. You certainly get more leg-room than you do on most short-to-medium haul European or US flights, there were films I was prepared to watch, and the food was pretty okay as these things go. Staff were nice, but no match for BA, in my experience.
I don’t really agree with the conclusion that European and US airlines are ‘falling behind’ – I would have thought that some of the airlines in the ‘comfort’ column are running a different kind of business model than those in the first column – particularly Etihad, Emirates and Qatar Airways, and probably Singapore Airlines. If you are an airline whose hub is not really much of a destination, and you specialise in being a hub between two long-haul flights (by which I mean 7+ hours) you probably HAVE TO compete more on service (particularly leg-room). On the other hand, if you do a lot of short-haul intra-European or intra-US flights, on average service is less likely to draw customers than price, although people will probably weigh it a bit more when taking e.g. a long-haul Lufthansa flight. I wonder did the Skytrax survey weight according to average or modal length of flight with each company?
I also have a personal pet theory that the only really palatable airline food is Indian food, which seems to survive reheating better than most other kinds of food – and the Gulf airlines serve it pretty often.