Lufthansa > Reviews > Economy Class disaster!

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality	Satisfactory
Customer Service	Very unhelpful
Punctuality	Awful
Space	Terrible
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Clean, and .  .  .  that's about it .  .  .
Disadvantages:	Poor service, No Personal screens, Pathetic legroom,  Poor experience all round

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

You know how Germans are notorious for their efficiency?
Doubtless they are with other things, like with Mercedes and BMW, but certainly not with airlines.
Travelling Singapore to Frankfurt with mum (Escaping from a previous God-forsaken flea-pit, and no, I don't mean Singapore)revealed such chaos and shambles that I am never flying Lufthansa again, full stop. First, it was packed. There wasn't one free seat. Lufthansa you see, doesn't believe in leaving a little room for error's sake. They pack em' in.

In such a film-packed season (halfway through 2004's summer movie time) there wasn't a huge amount on offer.
"Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights" sounded somewhat rude and not the sort of thing you'd let your children watch (springing to mind several rather dubious meanings) and neither did "Garfield: The Movie" sound very riveting.
But hey, that was all to come, wasn't it? We had a 12 hour flight ahead of us and legroom that made the back of the original Mini seem generous and well-proportioned. So we waited.
"We are sorry to inform you that the left engine has a problem and will take 15 minutes to fix"
Aaaah!! Oh well, look on the bright side. Good thing they discovered it before we had taken off. Hope those engineers managed to find that old spanner or mangled human, or whatever it is so we can take off and land safely.

So, even though the engine was now fixed, they had now to cut through all the red tape and procedures (Presumably). This took about half and hour. Mum was almost fuming.

Finally we took off, without one spare seat on the whole plane. It's true. I heard it from the stewardesses.
Ohhh. So far the worst thing about Lufthansa is the Legroom. Take Ryanair's Legroom and divide it by half. That's the answer folks.
About an hour later we heard a crackly voice buzz down the loud speakers - one of the stewardesses spoke in a completely uniform tone, but I fancy I sensed some trembling in her voice. She said something that went like this:
"We are sorry to inform you that a passenger on board has been taken very ill, and If there is anyone board with any medical experience will they please alert the staff"
She definitely said that last bit. There was a horrified gasp went round the plane. Everyone pulled that horrified face they pull in movies when they have just be shot or impaled.Someone directly behind us stood up. They stewardess walked towards him and told him to sit back down, there was already someone who had volunteered.

20 minutes later another crackly German voice: (This is all true)
"We are sorry to inform you that the passenger has been taken seriously ill and we need to go back to Singapore in order to save this person's life"

Another gasp, quieter, more horrified this time.

"We are starting to turn round now (or something like that)
In order to safely land, we need to jettison our fuel"

Think about that for a moment. Several thousand gallons of aviation spirit, all emptied into the Indian Ocean. Think how many fish we must of killed.
SLAM! The aeroplane's wheels hit the runway. This was not a normal landing. The plane carried on most of it's momentum, for we needed to get to the terminal as soon as possible.
The pilot slowed down at the last minute. The doors were hurredly opened. We we told to stay where we were. I heard noises that indicated they had a stretcher and were getting the person off the plane.

That was the last I ever heard of him/her. For all I know he/she could be dead.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are very sorry for the delay....."
And so on. And then we took off.

An Hour later we had the inflight entertainment. No little-screen on-the-back-of-each-seat, as my family have lovingly christened them, like you would a new born, gurgling baby. Like Singapore Airlines had.
Like pretty much any airline I've flown on in the last few years. Just a big ol' blurry projected-on-a-sheet-for-a-screen setup for the whole bloomin' row to watch. This so-called DIrty Dancing obviously required closer inspection. Hmmm, a girl wants to dance so befriends a hot Cuban boyfriend. Nothing sleazy yet. I sort of drifted off during the bit where she started getting famous (At least in Cuban dancing circles) But temporarily awoke to reveal some rather crude scene. Drifted off again.

"DING DONG" "Meals will now be served. They'll probably be rather dry, cold, take ages to come, and when it does come you'll have to use plastic cutlery that snaps at some crucial point of the meal, and the meal will fufill the old airline meal cliche of tasting like mashed cardboard soaked in water or some brown glue-like stuff they like to call gravy."
(Ok, she didn't really say that, but it let me tell a joke and tell you what the meal was like at the same time, and, yes, my fork did snap at a crucial point in the meal)

The "dessert" was another cliche, was a bowl of soggy fruit with one or two "bum chunks" of something no-one wants to eat, like papaya. They were serving coffee with it, and if I remember rightly, Pepsi rather than Coke. BOOOO!

Drifted off shortly, despite drinking that black coffee, which I could not make into real coffee, due a tiny little capsule of "Creamer" which was inadaquate, and an oxymoron, to say the least.

Woke up again, having missed "Garfield: The Movie"
Darn. Oh well. Hangonaminute! Must... Have... Pepsi...
I pressed the service button. Nuffin' 'appened. So I performed the usual ceremony the entire western world performs in times of crisis. I pressed it again, this time longer and harder, hoping in vain for a smiling stewardess to rush forward and say "Hello, Gorgeous, yes, you with the glasses. How may I be of service to you?... A Pepsi? With pleasure!!" but expecting a storming Bavarian femme fatale to spit: "NOW what do you want?"

I waited in deadly anticipation. Still nothing happened
so I groggily arose as well as I could, considering the legroom (Maybe the "seriously ill" passenger suffered from a case of blood clotting, I don't know)
went to the "Hatch" and found all the German Steward's and Stewardesses all at least 6 ft 1 laughing and talking. Embarrassed, I asked the nearest one for a Pepsi.
"You will need to ask her, I cannot help you because I'm Talking/ Seats number 7 and 42 need some earplugs/I need a barry/ or some other garbled explanationfollowed by "Ask her"

"Her" was a tiny little young Chinese women about 4 ft 8 grovelling on the floor, doing all the hard work. And this is on a serious note: Although I think the British government goes far too over the top about all this politically and racially correct stuff, and you didn't come on Ciao to listen to this stuff, but I think this is rather disturbing. This women wasn't smiling, or enjoying her work. She was working flat out fufilling the needs of the aircraft and it's crew.
She was the same rank as them, getting paid as much as them, and yet she wasn't one of them. I'm not saying that joining in with slacking off work is good, quite the opposite, but why does the poor asian girl has to work 24/7 just so the german staff members can slack. She can't do anything about it.

I thanked her for giving me the Pepsi ( She was extremely busy at the time, and dropped everything just to help me) and, feeling rather guilty, went and sat back down. There followed the most boring hours of my life probably. Because of the "incident" hours ago, the flight was about 4 hours longer than it should of been.
On and on and on...
No movies were being shown so I plugged in my earphones to the radio function. 'click' Faint opera with some (presumably) fat women bawling away .
'click'
Funky 'ba ba ba da buh badu ba"
'click'
Disco rock BUHM BUHM BUHM
'click'
Tätigkeit so abgesprochen und alt auch für Lieder, or something like that suggested that this was German Radio.
'click'
Der Wert des Bildes wurde von Experten auf 54 Millionen Euro geschätzt.. must be the news.. and so on.
There wasn't one radio station on there I could understand. Back to Boredom then.

Eventually we landed in Frankfurt, and by this time a blood clot was probably forming in my lower leg, It was too hot and I needed another Pepsi (Like it always is on planes), and I had a headache.
Well we went though the terminal, which, like all terminals, was in progress and a complete shambles and where I nearly got hit on the head by some falling pipes which were meant to be part of the ventilation system.
To cut a long story short, they consideratly managed to lose our baggage containing a good deal of what we owned, and we didn't get it back until many enquiries and days later.

Alright, so the flight I experienced was a one in a million.
But it's all true, and all really happened. Lufthansa is a disorganized mess, stingy and un-human. The seating sucked, the food was naff, and the service was an exclamation mark.
I have never travelled on Lufthansa since, and never will do.

Thanks for reading! (No, I'm not against Germans, they make great cars and are great friends so no offence to anyone reading this review) Please rate this review before you go for I like to know what people think of my writing!

Cheers, Paul