An Experience to Forget

07/02/07 03:24 Filed in: Other
Logo-Qatar-Airways


People kept on stating the fact that Qatar Air is the next big thing. "You want to travel, fly with Qatar Air, it is an experience to remember" agencies told us. Well it wasn’t for me! You see, I have just been to Italy for the past two weeks which was THE experience to remember; however, the trips from and to our destinations were a disaster.

Obviously, I had a lot of choices on which airlines to choose from: Kuwait Airlines, Emirates Air, Qatar Air, even the Middle East Airlines were all good choices. Yet, Qatar was my first choice, and oh boy did I regret it. When you watch the advertisements of Qatar Airways on TV, you'd be astonished about their perspective on how to satisfy their passengers' comfort; however, in my experience and in both trips, they've managed to demolish mine.

On both occasions from Kuwait to Italy and back, we had to take two different planes because we had to transfer in Doha Airport. The small plane which took us from Kuwait to Doha was nothing but an ordinary old fashioned airplane. No TV monitors, and no additional pampering was offered. You would presume that due to it being a short transit, it would be the worst of your trip. However, to my surprise the worse had yet to come. As soon as the plane landed, a bus was waiting to pick us up; which by the way is the only way to get to the airport because believe it or not they have no actual connecting terminals. We arrived to the transfer area where more than six planes had just arrived and over one thousand people were all standing in one large space waiting to get hold of the queue, which didn't exist. You see, in order for you to transfer, you had to go through the passport control and through that magnetic-metal-detecting-door. Of the six existing doors, only two were operating for over a thousand passengers, how dumb was that? It took us over 20 minutes to squeeze in the crowd to actually locate the queue, and another 25 minutes to finally get to the detecting door which after all the wait was no longer operating as a detecting door but simply a walkthrough to the transfer area.

That experience alone ruined it. I was ready to turn back and go home. Off course, we didn’t have time to look at their tiny shopping area, because we had to run to our terminal as our flight had already started boarding. The second plane was huge, with an amazing media system, which was the highlight of my trip. The seats were OK, the distance between one seat and the other was extremely minimal, and most importantly, flight attendants were very rude.

Overall Rating of the Airline: 5.2/10

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Posted By:
BQ

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