Jaunted

Seat:
We’d paid £50 two weeks before flying to book an emergency exit seat, so we had plenty of legroom. In fact, it was a fantastic seat: 29A on a 747-400. It’s in the second row of economy, so you get a window (very important to us) – but there’s no 28A, so your legroom is twice the distance of the two “official” emergency exits, 28B and 28C (thanks John Walton for the tip off!)

The width and comfort were fine ; not as comfy as Virgin Atlantic’s economy seats, which are squashy with a good headrest, but nothing to complain about nonetheless. We weren’t, for example, needing to get up and crack our back every 30 minutes as we did last time we flew Continental’s ramrod hard and straight seats between London and Newark.

Service:
We said this before, we’ve said it to anyone who’ll listen since, and we’ll say it again—really fantastic, a breath of fresh air from the typical BA service. Let’s just hope the new crew—they’ve been with BA for just over a year now—doesn’t fall into the grumpy jaded trap. We’d be ever so :’( if they did that.

Amenities:
Crappy headphones, blanket and pillow (typical economy ware). With a crappy toothbrush/paste set and a charity envelope. Rubbish—but hey, it’s economy. We’d rather they concentrated on the food…

Food and drink:
…Oh. The best we can say is that there were plus and minuses. We appreciated the fact that they laid on a Christmas dinner (turkey! Brussels sprouts! Roast potatoes! Mince pies!) but, tbh, it wasn’t great. Again, not up to Virgin standard. Our Christmas mix was teamed with an inedible salad of lettuce and purple sludge, and two cheese-topped bread rolls, which we didn’t dare try. The only actually tasty part? The mince pie with cream. Yum.

Before landing, we were served an egg and salmon roll. Nice idea, or it would have been if there’d been more than a scraping of egg and more than a flake of salmon. A nice organic yoghurt too, though being allergic to pineapple we couldn’t indulge, and a slice of Christmas cake, which was a nice touch, and the only part of the box we tackled.

Drinks were plentiful – we asked for a G&T at take off and were handed two. That saw us through the flight, though others around us were liberally downing, even in economy.

There was also a snackbox of candy in the galley: Twix, Kit Kat, cookies etc. You could go help yourself to this when you got peckish. Cute.

In-Flight Entertainment:
On demand console, with a good selection of relatively recent movies; Bridesmaids, The Hangover II, Friends With Benefits and Crazy Stupid Love jumped out at us. Nice selection of music, too; they’d even bought in a never-ending compilation of Christmas music, that literally saw us over the Atlantic from Iceland to well over Canada. They didn’t have to do that, but it was thoughtful programming. You haven't lived until you’ve flown over Santaland Greenland humming Christmas beats.

Pilot:
Special shout out to the pilot, who prepped us for the flight fun by telling us we were going a slightly different route than normal because of heavy traffic—from reindeer—and told us to look for Santa out the window. He ended by asking “Santa’s little helpers” to put the doors to manual. Amazing.

Bottom line:
With that seat, and that crew, we wouldn’t hesitate in flying BA to Vegas again. Despite the crap food and the seat not being quite as good, we’d rank it higher than Virgin on that route, or at least, we will until Virgin installs IFE on demand in econ. Even then, this will be one of our most memorable flights. From henceforth, we’re renaming Christmas Eve “The Day We Stopped Despising British Airways."

[Photos: juliab]