flydubai

My wife and I took 2 flights with Fly Dubai - Dubai to Amman return. Onboard issues: legroom won't be an issue if you are shorter than 6' (which I'm not) yes I understand the business model is a low-cost carrier but paying for water? The IFE is useless unless you want to watch the flight map so be prepared to pay for any sort of entertainment. My main concern with Fly Dubai however is that both flights were each over 1 hour late. Having reviewed some forums about Fly Dubai this seems to be a trend of theirs. What made this worse is that our return flight was followed by an international connection and in addition to the unexplained 1 hour delay our checked bags took 1 hour to come out. We came within minutes of missing our connection so beware if you have a connection and a Fly Dubai flight is involved - you'd better consider giving yourself more than enough time in between flights to account for their unreliability of avoid them altogether.

Dubai to Doha. Flight was terrible. The mostly young crew was the loudest most obnoxious crew I've ever come across in 30 years of travel. They spent the entire flight loudly laughing and exchanging jokes among themselves in the galley disturbing the passengers. To make matters worse one very irritating female flight attendant was criticizing some passengers (using curse words) not caring whether anyone heard her or not. Her behavior is simply unacceptable. Never ever again.

My wife and I boarded a Flydubai flight when she was 7 months pregnant (which is allowed by all international airlines and she had the necessary doctor papers to take this flight). To cut a long story short the ground staff of Flydubai refused to give us the seats we paid 200 AED extras for. That was fine (security always takes priority) but they refused also to give us alternative seats suitable for a pregnant woman gave us ad-hoc seats totally unsuitable for pregnancy and separated us on top of this. Staff used an inappropriate tone. On board things were not much better and the offensive tone staff used made even other passengers take our defence. We finally managed to get appropriate seats thanks to other passengers. To ad to this the pre-purchased meal we ordered and paid for was not available on the plane.

Dubai - Kathmandu return. Both flights delayed by an hour and very busy. Outbound agents at the gate wisely checked in lots of hand luggage into the hold (for free) due to minimal storage space onboard. Outbound flight had no IFE and was disappointed with no inflight magazine (but then they have taken out the seat pockets so there would be nowhere to put it anyway!). Return flight was on a brand new brilliant B737 with personal IFE and mood lighting. Excellent crew who handled a medical emergency well and all were very engaging with passengers - really good to see. Transfer to T3 to connect with Emirates was smooth although distances are long so it takes time. Had to collect boarding pass in DXB which wasn't the case when checking in out the inbound - be good to resolve this - although reassuring that he baggage tickets were scanned and confirmed and all arrived at final destination.

Overall I was impressed with the efficiency and professionalism of FlyDubai and staff. Several negatives stand out however that fellow travelers should pay attention to. First you need to understand the business model requires paying extra for everything. Your assigned seat any checked luggage water or food on the flight inflight entertainment - you name it. The first flight I was on had no video onboard not even screens on the center aisle. Second the return flight had video but the quality of the touch screens was so poor and unmanageable that I was not even tempted to watch a movie for fear of it being messed up. I noticed very few people watching movies on the screen - instead they read or watched movies on the tablets. I also noticed that the flight staff struggled to get the touch screens they used to work. They had to keep touching them to get it to respond. They really should fix that. The flight staff were professional but only one of the two stewardesses was friendly. Thirdly the return flight was delayed one hour with no explanation from the rather unfriendly ground crew who were running the door. As a result we got into Dubai 40 minutes late - and then we had to wait 30 minutes to get our luggage after getting through passport control! This was very frustrating at the end of a long day especially as there is no excuse for this is a modern airport. I don't think I will fly the airline again because on top of this I had to pay AED 640 for my car to be parked for 5 days in long term parking. Coming from Abu Dhabi to Dubai I would have been better to take a cab. This is not the airlines fault but fellow travelers would do well to be aware of this one.

FlyDubai to Colombo September 2013: Their home base Terminal 2 in Dubai in my opinion is unpleasant inconvenient and facilities are lacking. Secondly what's with the 3 hour check-in requirement? The check-in took forever - our agent was really slow. The aircraft are admittedly smallish but then again its a 737 and not a 777 or A380 so its to be expected. Interior was clean and in a good state of repair. The F/As in my opinion had a more natural and genuinely friendly demeanour compared to Emirates' crew. Perhaps because the FlyDubai crew were quite young. They seemed to enjoy their jobs. Legroom was fine for me as I am not that tall. F/A service was adequate and quite prompt. Food purchased from the menu was not bad at all for a low cost airline. Alcohol is overpriced at AED 40 for a whisky. The 737 is obviously not the fastest plane versus the 777 for instance so I found the duration of the trip to be a little more tiresome as a result. I will fly FlyDubai again but only for family trips and only in their new business class offering.

Dubai to Beirut 8/08/2013. Flight supposed to depart at 8am but as we were about to take-off a medical emergency delayed the plane for almost 2 hours. Even though the flight attendants were apologetic the captain didn't bother once to speak to passengers or tell us what was going on. During the 2 hours delay we were left in the plane with no air-conditioning of any kind. Passengers began to get agitated and tempers frayed. Only after many passengers began to complain loudly that we were allowed to board buses to wait until the situation was dealt with. I have to admit that the flight attendants were professional and were doing their best to deal with a serious situation but shame on the captain for not once bothering to tell us what was being done. I will fly with them again since they offer good fares and connections but their pilots should be better trained.

CMB-DXB. As a Brit I had reservations about flying with a low cost airline for those of you reading this from Europe you will be aware what low cost actually means. The competitors such as EZY/RYR are awful and I was expecting a similar experience. The pre sales experience was not good however when I checked in at the airport the crew were lovely moving our pre booked seats to better locations on the aircraft. Check-in staff seemed strict with baggage rules thankfully we were under our baggage limits are paying only 40AED to purchase an extra 10KG! Anyway boarded the aircraft and it was amazing. Brand new Boeing mood lighting specious comfortable lovely crew brilliant service on time! Would recommend FlyDubai to anyone!

SKT-DXB-SKT. Flight to Dubai: FZ 338 20 May 05.45. Return to Sialkot: FZ 337 24 May 00.30. My overall my experience with Fly Dubai was great. Plane was very good but not spacious. Crew co-operative and friendly. Overall journey was very nice except couple of things as I mentioned before. They shouldn't apply charges for at least a cup of tea/coffee soft drink water etc. Would recommend if the seating was wider and there were no entertainment charges. Overall a nice journey with Fly Dubai.

The Ryanair of the Middle East. Last week flew KWI-DXB-MCT return. My knees have still not recovered from the totally inadequate legroom and seat pitch as well as the incredibly badly-designed Recaro seats which had Phillips-head screws mounted exactly where one's knees meet the seatbacks. The planes were clean and are not covered with tacky advertising but literally everything on board - even water - costs extra. The personnel onboard varies on the KWI-DXB leg the cabin attendants were extremely strict in their enforcement of seat-backs in the upright position for take-off whereas on other legs they were not really interested in coming out of the galley at all. One flight used a 737-800 without any entertainment system all others had the in-seat screens but except for the in-flight map everything else costs extra. Duty-free service is wildly overpriced. DXB airport's terminal 2 the "home" of FlyDubai has some of the filthiest restrooms I have seen. Never again.