Ia Qatar Airways still the World’s Number 1 Airline?
Since our last successful long-haul voyage with Qatar Airways to the U.S., we weren’t hesitant to book with them again for the 9.5-hour flight Doha to Cape Town, after all since this flight Skytrax had voted them World’s Number 1 airline.
Living in Abu Dhabi this, unfortunately, does mean a little fussing for us in the transfers to arrive at Doha. Despite only needing about 37 minutes in the air you still need to allow 2 hours check-in time, lots of runway taxiing and transfer time making the journey considerably longer door to door – but price-wise it’s immensely competitive!
(NB as at June 2017 this route AUH via DOH to CPT is no longer available due to a diplomatic dispute between Qatar and several Gulf neighbours.)
Where’s my seat?
We are a travelling party of five these days; 2 adults, 2 children and 1 infant. Having accepted that Master J no longer fits the bassinet, our next best hope was to simply be seated together with the infant on our lap but playing the empty seat tactic where possible.
Qatar’s online system refused to let me pre-book the seats for the DOH-CPT leg despite repeated attempts. A few days prior to flight I tried ringing Qatar Airways to resolve. The customer service representative, in a less than friendly tone, told me I should have just booked the bassinet if I had an infant, mumble, mumble. She could only seat us in two different parts of the plane so we just had to accept this and try and fix it at the airport.
So imagine our shock and surprise of arriving at Abu Dhabi airport to commence this 4-leg journey only to be told my husband and three children were now seated together, but I had been placed on STANDBY!
Yes, all booked on one family ticket, all sharing a name and one of us placed on standby – with an infant that apparently made it on the plane without me! Here was me frustrated that they couldn’t seat us together in the same cabin, let alone not seated on the same PLANE!!!
The next two hours while we waited for our connection to Doha were, of course, spent making contingency plans (with tired, cranky children already on hand as we headed into the dead of night; another unfortunate think of flying out of the Middle East the vast