I Spoke Too Soon....

Two weeks, two roundtrips on Iberia...

I already wrote up my first report, in which I noted that they'd reconfigured the cabins and legroom was better.

As fate would have it, I spoke too soon.

My return flight NCE-MAD was no problems. There were several of us from my company onboard, and we'd all had very little sleep the night before for various reasons... Mine was working on a deadline of 0200 with a customer, and we finished at about 0130. By the time I'd returned to the hotel, I was able to get about two hours of sleep before heading off to the airport.

MAD-ORD is where things went south in a hurry...

One of my teammates was on the same flight, and thru a seat-swap, we were seated together. A few minutes into the flight, she discovered that her seat didn't recline, so I offered to swap as I had planned to work. Ordered the express meal service, and after my tray was removed, I plugged in the laptop. Battery had a pretty good charge left, but the seat power wasn't working... Told the purser, and she did a reset on the seat. No luck.

Did what I could to finish the work on my docs, but thanks to the idiocy of our IT department, we have new extra power thirsty widescreen laptops, which are as power efficient as a Hummer. An hour later, the battery was dead, and we still had seven hours of flying left.

Unable to work, unable to recline my seat, there wasn't a whole lot to do. I'd seen every one of the movies on their 12 channels of IFE already, and with the cabin lights dimmed for everyone else to be able to enjoy their fully-flat beds, I got to sit upright and try to learn Spanish from the inflight magazine.

Without a doubt, it was one of the worst flight experiences I'd had in a long time.

To make matters worse, the purser on the flight didn't bother to check back with me to see if the problems had been resolved. She spent 15 minutes showing duty free items to the person across the aisle, but never again acknowledged that there might have been a problem to resolve.

Had I not been under a deadline, it might have been tolerable. But I was. And the longer I sat watching Airshow creep across Greenland and Newfoundland, the madder I got...

Arrival at ORD was quick, aside from the line of foreign tourists in the US Passports queue. Bag was one of the first off, and I was able to get to the house about 50 minutes after docking.


IB6274 ORD-MAD A346 Ontime

The following Monday, I was off to Madrid again. No problems with the seat power, no problems with recline. Ordered the express dinner, and somehow the crew managed to give me the scallops & mango appetizer instead of the sea bass entre. Too tired to fight, I ate the scallops (quite tasty), and managed to get a good five hours of sleep on a seven hour flight.

Arrival at MAD was a little more frustrating than usual. We arrived after several other flights, and the foreign passport queues were jammed. Unlike the US, you go thru a central queue, but then line up without any assistance at the various immigration officer stands. Somehow, at the one I chose, there was a woman who had a documentation problem. The officer directed her to the secondary office, called the priest who was next in line ahead, cleared him, and then closed his station without warning. There were 12 of us in the queue, and he simply waved us back over to the other queues... I've had that happen in MIA, and nothing pisses me off more than having nobody managing the queues. Not even a broken seat pisses me off that much...

Fortunately, most of us tried to blend into the adjacent queue, and the people there were accommodating. Two minutes later, the officer came back, re-opened his station, and a few of us were able to get back into his line... Hardly the best welcoming I've had to the EU.

Despite the delays at immigration, a five minute wait for a train and the three minute train ride to the main terminal, our bags weren't out when I arrived at the claim area. Worse, when the bags did start arriving, premium bags didn't start arriving until about 50-70 "normal" bags had been sent onto the belt. If you're going to advertise a premium service, then deliver it. If AA can do it, anyone can....


This was my first stay in Spain of any length. Three nights in Aranjuez, which is where the summer palace is located. My guess is that it's not used much anymore, as the gardens were a little shaggy in places... Stayed at Hotel Barcelo, which was a disaster. It's a fairly new hotel, but the service was poor. We had about 150 people attending a conference over a five day period. They had the exact same food for breakfast each day, which is understandable. Lunch? Same food all five days. The two dinners they served us? Yep. Same food each meal. No variety whatsoever... A few of us wound up going to the bar and ordering lunch & dinner on the last day, since we'd had enough of gazpacho, fish and veal kneecaps.


IB6275 MAD-ORD A343 Ontime

Flight back MAD-ORD was mostly uneventful, however the seat power failed again. This is a recurring trend with IB, and I've had it happen on three of my last eight flights with two different laptops and power adapters. Ordered the quick meal, got about 90 minutes of work done, and then tried to sleep and watch movies... In comparison to the previous week, the purser checked back with me three or four times, offering to charge the laptop somewhere else.



Summary

I'm getting tired of the sub-par service with IB, and sincerely hope the BA-AA alliance gets approved soon so I can start flying on them to/from NCE. My next trip is already booked on AA to MXP.