Compared with the misery of Air Transat, Thomas Cook (flying from Montreal to London) was a dream: relatively quiet, with bottled water laid out at every seat in advance (which frankly I think is nearly a necessity these days, now that it’s hard to bring your own drinks onto a plane). The legroom isn’t extensive, but didn’t feel quite as miserably cramped as the Transat box, either. I’m not sure whether Air Transat figures more than half their customers are under 10 years old and therefore don’t need legroom, or whether it’s part of a plan to get people to upgrade to Club class. Either way, I didn’t feel quite so squashed on the Thomas Cook flight.
It’s still a budget airline, of course, and charges for headsets and additions to your food and drink repertoire; the service is not as full as on British Airways.
And the food: not so great. We were told there would be roast beef and yorkshire pudding for dinner. The roast beef consisted of three small sandwich-thin slices — their surfaces beginning to turn iridescent green in the way of meat that’s slightly elderly but not inedible yet — swathed in a thick brown sauce with small hunks of potato. Next to this was an object the size of a fifty-cent piece (both in diameter and thickness), slightly thicker around the outer rim, possessing no flavor at all and having the general texture of soft rubber foam. Context implies this was meant to be the pudding. I found myself wondering whether the experience differed very much from trying to eat a contraceptive sponge.
But overall, charming people and relatively comfortable service for a cheap flight. Just don’t rely on them to feed you properly.
