It had been a couple of years since my family and I had last been to Spain, mainly because we didn’t want to take our daughter on a plane while she was at the fidgety age of 18 months. Now that she’s two and a half it was time to travel abroad once more.
So Spain it was (Granada in particular) and seeing we live 20 minutes from Manchester Airport it was time to look into direct flights…don’t want to be travelling for too long with a little one! After a pretty short search it became very clear that the only company flying direct to Malaga from Manchester was Monarch airlines.
Let’s book some tickets….
Naturally it is possible to book your tickets on-line via the Monarch web site - www.flycrown.com. I booked the tickets in two batches, because my parents were coming to Spain with us for the first week of the fortnight holiday. This is when the first complication arose. Like many e-commerce systems the first time you use it you have to provide all your address and credit card details, but next time you just quote your customer number and booking is much more straightforward. The thing is, after I’d booked the first batch of tickets I couldn’t actually work out what my customer was since it wasn’t on the confirmation e-mail. In the end I had to register all over again to book the second batch of tickets.
At the time of booking the tickets you can also specify the meal you require on the flight (normal, vegetarian, kids etc.)as well as whether an aisle or window site is preferred. This would have been great if we hadn’t actually been asked the very same questions again when we checked in for our flight, and when my daughter didn’t actually receive a kid’s meal!!
Let’s check-in …. Well, the only downside to the direct flight was that it was at 7:45am, and we were supposed to check in at 6:15am. Therefore I decide to book a hotel room for the three of use so that we could just get up and check-in without the drive to the airport (look out for a review of the Radisson Hotel at Manchester Airport coming soon). When I’d booked the hotel room for the night before I rang Monarch to see if we could possibly check-in for the flight the night before meaning we’d only need to take our hand luggage in the morning and could bypass the big queues. This is a service that is offered by the big airlines but not by Monarch it appears. In the end it wasn’t such a big issue since there was a queue of two people when we checked-in!
We weren’t that fortunate on our return to England, but more of that later.
The flight itself… Well, I have to admit that the legroom on the Monarch flight was probably the least I have ever experienced. This really bothered my since we’d paid full whack for our tickets …Monarch is NOT a budget airline, but it sure felt like it. The outbound staff were miserable and extremely unhelpful when we pointed out that our daughter hadn’t received a kid’s meal even though it had been booked on the web site and confirmed at check-in.
The pilot, to the contrary, was excellent. Both friendly and informative.
The food was actually pretty good, as far as plane food goes and the staff were very generous with extra drinks.
The holiday is over, let’s go home…..
The real trouble started when we got to Malaga Airport for our return flight to Manchester. Because Monarch has a policy of letting all passengers check-in at any of their 4 desks there are people on later flights queuing in front of people flying sooner. In our case we got stuck behind passengers for a Luton flight that wasn’t due to take off for 3 hours, while out Manchester flight was leaving in 1 hour. It got quite worrying when the queue had hardly moved and we were supposed to take off in 20 minutes. Eventually all the Manchester passengers were rushed through check-in and the mad run through Passport Control and on towards the plane began…not easy with loads of hand luggage and a two year old!!!
All in all I we were unimpressed by Monarch airlines but don’t really have any alternatives without driving to another Airport such as Liverpool or East Midlands. The service we experienced was equal to, if not worse, than that offered by budget airlines such as Easyjet but at full price.
Value for Money is NOT their forte.
More details
Class flown most frequently
Economy
How often do you travel with this airline
First time
Where did you book
Directly with this airline
Safety
Good
How well does it cater for disabled people
Don't know
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