Air Transat > Reviews > Value-for-Money Flights

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Satisfactory
Customer Service	Friendly and attentive
Punctuality	Satisfactory
Space	Fairly Comfortable
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Very cheap  -  Half price of British Airways
Disadvantages:	Smaller seats; No fancy extras like with BA

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Normally, my parents book flights well in advance, and up until now we have always flown British Airways. This Summer, however, we left it much later before booking a holiday, partly because many people say it is cheaper to book late, and partly because we had already booked a flight to Rome in October, making the Summer holiday slightly less important (normally we stay at home during October and have our main holiday in Summer). However it soon became apparent that we were not going to get a decent holiday at any price, when we went to numerous travel agents with no luck. Finally, we settled with what was probably the best option, which was a charter flight with AirTransat to Toronto, Canada (Departing from Glasgow, A bit over 2 hours away from where I live in Aberdeen).

I was not looking forward to the flight as I'd heard that you had to pay for drinks, that you had to purchase the headphones and that the seats were cramped (which can increase the risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis, an uncommon, yet fatal condition caused by long periods of inactivity). The only real good point was that the flight cost under half of what an equivalent British Airways flight would cost.

The journey did not start well, with the flight being delayed two hours because of a technical difficulty. But, after hours of tedious waiting we got onto the plane, and took off quickly and smoothly. It turned out that soft drinks were free after all and that AirTransat were giving out the headphones for nothing because of the delay. The seats were also relatively good although a little narrow. The most annoying thing about the flight was that the light above me didn't work, which made playing my Game Boy Advance (my only form of entertainment for the 6+ hour journey) close to impossible (and there was no way I was going to watch the in-flight films, which were too bad even to write opinions about).

Overall, though, the flight went OK, until about forty minutes away from landing when we got a nasty surprise. "Hello, this is your captain speaking. We're about forty minutes away from Toronto airport, and there's a thunderstorm so we can't land. Unfortunately, we don't have enough fuel to circle round." That doesn't sound good. Is our holiday going to end...prematurely? "So, we're going to fly to Montreal airport. We should be there in about half an hour."

Well, we landed safely in Montreal, and the captain announced that we would be ready to fly back to Toronto in five minutes. Fifteen minutes later the captain told us we would be leaving in another five minutes. Only one hour after we had landed did we finally take off.

Despite the problems with the flight, the holiday went very well. We spent three days in Toronto, before spending another three days in a country cottage overlooking a huge lake (where I caught 41 of my first fish), then went to Ottawa, the nation's capital, for four days, and then down to Niagara for the remainder of the holiday.

The flight back was better than the flight in, except, once again, my light didn't work (and neither did those in the seats in front of me and the seats behind me.

I would say that, overall, AirTransat is a perfectly good airline, and that the problems in my flight were really down to bad luck. It certainly doesn't come near British Airways in terms of comfort but at half the price it's much better value for money. For anyone flying to Canada, AirTransat is a great choice, but if you have the money, go with British Airways.

----IMPORTANT UPDATE----

I recently heard two (supposedly true) stories which lead me to doubt the safety of AirTransat. One of these is that an AirTransat plane had to land prematurely at Orlando airport when the cabin filled with smoke, and the other is that an AirTransat plane ran out of fuel during a flight and had to glide 15 miles before making an emergency landing. Although they have had a good safety record, these stories would seriously put me of flying AirTransat again.