Emirates Airlines - UAE > Reviews > The good and the bad side of Emirate

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Good
Customer Service	Unhelpful
Punctuality	Poor
Space	Comfortable
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Reasonable Price with great services and conditions
Disadvantages:	When the flight is not on schedule then the whole connecting flight mess up

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Emirate Airline!
Well-known as a great airline with great service, great food, and great entertainment on board, comfort on board, etc…etc…

All Emirates aircraft are provided with personal TVs and have fax and telephone facilities as well. Before take-off passengers are offered reading material, and towels. Once in the air, passengers are treated with a choice of meals and free drinks. For children the airhostess will provide some toys and games or they can watch the children movies or play games on the personal TV.
This is the greatest thing that I most enjoy is the personal TV; this is a really cute TV at the back of each seats, which give you a good idea of the delights to come. Each passenger can choose the great choices of movies or news etc… provided by the airline on their own preference, so passengers are not force to watch only one movie all together. Beside movies, passengers also can play games connected to the other passenger in the other seats, for example playing chess game against another passenger, etc.
The courteous and good looking young men and women whom Emirates recruits from all over the world as the aircrews to serve and pamper Emirates clients, they all are very friendly with smile which I hardly find anymore these days in another airline.

Not mention about the seats, the seats are comfortable and more space than the seats in any other airline, with leg rests and each seat have a specially shaped neck rest that supports your neck, quite unlike the pillows on other airlines which make no contribution to the support of the upper part of your body.

Emirate Airlines also have a mile reward program called Skyward and I am a member of it. This Skyward service I find it very good. As a Skyward member you will earn miles every time you fly with Emirate Airline or its affiliates and you can redeem your miles for free flight or some other things offered in their catalog. You can be their member for free, all you have to do is just to fill up the form and submit it.

I have flown with Emirates Airlines many times. I have to fly back to my country at least twice a year and I have tried many Airlines too.
I shall agree that so far on my experiences with Airlines, Emirate Airlines is the best.

But I had a bad experience on my last trip with Emirates Airlines, it was in July 2005. I was on my trip from Jakarta to Munich via Dubai.
I got to the Jakarta airport earlier as usual since I don't want to miss my flight. The check-in counter has not open yet. I had been waiting for 1 hour in Jakarta airport and finally the check-in counter open.
When I check-in the officer at the counter told me that the flight will be late for 1 hour, I told her that I have a connecting flight in Dubai to Munich and I only have 2 hour time in Dubai to get into another aircraft to Munich. She convinced me that I would be able to catch the plane to Munich in Dubai. After waiting for another 1 hour, finally I managed to get into the plane comfortably. As usual in the plane I really enjoy the flight with their good food, more comfortable seat (for me the seat is not such a big problem since I am very petite *smile*), good entertainment and of course also their friendly services from the aircrews. Although sometime I feel it too much when they always wake me up for breakfast etc…
One thing I didn't enjoy, that the plane was full with the workers from Indonesia who go to another country to work and almost all of them can not speak English which make it difficult for the aircrew to manage them in the plane, and they made much noise during the flight :p
One time the airhostess need to ask a woman worker who sat close to me, if she would like to eat fish or chicken and she couldn't understand the airhostess, then the airhostess came to me and woke me up just to ask me if Indonesian people like fish or chicken most (God, for that she need to wake me up????). Apart from that I enjoyed the whole thing.

Now come the bad part, soon I arrived in Dubai. I got stuck in a long queue in the security check, so I told the officer that I have a connecting flight to Munich which I have to catch in the hurry since the Flight from Jakarta was late. Amazingly the officer didn't want to make an exception for that and I still have to queue, when it came for my turn to be checked this officer even ask me to take off my shoes and belt, which made the process take longer time. Once I passed this security check, I ran so fast to the other gate which was at the end of the airport. I reached the gate it took me some minutes to catch my breath before I start to talk to the officer at the check-in counter. And guess what??? He told me that the gate already closed 5 minutes ago. I asked him if the plane already take off. And he said not yet but the gate already closed and he could not let me in. I tried to explain the situation why I was late. But still he wouldn't let me in. And I had to proceed to the office of the Emirate to see what they could do for in order to help me to get to my destination.

Well, at the office counter, were already long queue. I finally got my chance to talk to the officer and he told me that they could put me into another plane to Vienna which is actually the same distance from Munich to the town I live. The plane would take off in 1 hour time, but if I took this flight, they could not manage to move my luggage from the aircraft I flew with before to the aircraft which would fly with to Vienna. Therefore I could only get my luggage in couple of days in Vienna Airport which for me sound ridiculous because then I had to drive all the way to Vienna again which would take me about 3 hours just to pick up my luggage.
Another choice was to wait for the next flight to Munich which would be in 7 hours, for that I would only get a lunch coupon from the Emirate Airline *grumbling*

I decided to wait 7 hours and took the coupon rather than to have my luggage some where in another aircraft or it's possible for me to lose it too.
Dubai Airport was certainly large and nice, but that day it was really full. I even couldn't find a comfortable seat where I could lay down a bit after long flight and running action I did.

Finally after a long suffering waiting of 7 hours, I got myself flying to Munich.

After this I still think Emirate after all is the best airline since I enjoy everything on board, if they could manage to give better service so that something like that will not happen anymore to their customers. Maybe they need to come up with a good communication system among their staffs and crew.