If you are familiar with my other articles, you’ll know that I generally don’t like to fly on budget airlines, yes because I’m a bit of a snob and I like the luxury’s you get with major airlines. But it’s not just that, when travelling on business, things like having a bit of comfort on your flight and at least a good luggage allowance without paying a load extra is all stuff that you need. Plus, the benefits of fast track and lounge access save you both time and money when travelling on a work trip.
And of course, I tend to stick to Star Alliance airlines so that I can gather points, meaning I can discount my upgrades and get free flights at a later date.
However, on this occasion the only sensible way for me to get from London to Nantes was via an easyJet flight. There are of course flights operating from other places, I could have flown to Frankfurt and then to Nantes from there, but that was an incredibly long way round and even I’m not mad enough to go that way. Plus, the price was horrifically more expensive. So, Gatwick to Nantes it is.
Booking the flight, how to do EasyJet in business class!
First thing was to choose the flights, there are two flights per day from Gatwick to Nantes, and very luckily the evening flights were quite late, which is very useful for me. My work was a Tuesday to Thursday job, so, I booked for a Monday evening flight out, and a Thursday evening flight back. This meant I got most of the day of work on Monday and then I’d be back late Thursday night allowing me a full day of work on the Friday, very convenient. Then there’s the choice of tickets, easyJet seem to offer 4 levels at the moment. Starting with no hand luggage other than a very small bag through to small hand luggage, big hand luggage and then finally the most expensive ticket gives you hold luggage. As I was billing this all back to the client, I wasn’t particularly worried about the costs, but I went for what they called the “Smart” ticket, which is second from top, giving you the large on board hand luggage option. And I will admit I did go up into my loft, where I keep my suitcases, and measured my larger hand luggage suitcase to make sure it fitted within their sizes.
The smart ticket also came with the speedy boarding, easyjet’s version of priority boarding, a choice of seat (you normally have to pay for seats choices), and this ticket included a seat up at the front. I noticed the included seat choice, however, did not include row 1, which was an extra £15. Knowing that easyJet planes don’t have a bulkhead in front of row 1, I didn’t really want to sit there with everyone tripping over my feet as they boarded, so I went for row 2.
Having chosen my ticket and seat, I then had to go through pages and pages of upselling trying to get me to buy all sorts of things from car hire to hotels to insurance. I turned all of this down and completed my booking.
Now to add on the luxuries I’m used to with travelling through an airport. First was fast track security, Gatwick is a major holiday hub and I don’t want to get mixed up with loads of people that have no idea how security works, so fast track security it was, only for a mere £6 extra.
Next, I need a lounge. Thanks to my gold Amex I still have some priority passes left to use up, so I started looking at the options available there. There are 4 lounge options at Gatwick that allow me access with priority passes, ranging in levels of luxury. At the bottom end there is the number one lounge which is no extra charge to get in on a priority pass. At the top end was the clubhouse lounge, which was actually the last lounge I went to when I flew with Swiss. This lounge was excellent and it was very quiet. The only catch with this was it is a bit more luxurious than the other ones, is that there is a £15 additional charge to pay on arrival, as well as using up one of my priority passes. I’d easily spend more than £15 on dinner or drink anyway that evening, so I thought why not have it in the luxury of a nice lounge where I can enjoy as much free sparkling wine and cocktails as I like? The lounge was due to close at 6:00 PM, one hour before my flight departs, but that’s fine I could leave then and wander down slowly ready for my speedy boarding experience.
So for additional £21 on top of my ticket that included a suitable size bag for my week of work, I’d managed to get myself fast track security, lounge access, early boarding and a seat at the front of the plane. I’m never particularly bothered about eating on short haul planes anyway so it didn’t bother me that there were only paid for meals on board. Plus, I’ll be off the plane nice and quickly at the other end so I can get through passport control and take my hour long uber ride to my final destination. I was all sorted, or so I thought.
I looked into booking the lounge and discovered they recommended pre-booking, which I tried to do. It was sold out, not a good sign. They did say they allowed walk-ins, therefor I decided to wing-it on the day and see what happened, read on to see where I ended up.
Outbound
I took my now well practiced route to the airport, a train down to Dorking and then the Reading to Gatwick train to get to Gatwick itself, it was nice and quiet given it was a Monday afternoon, but before rush-hour. Upon arriving the airport, I took the customary walk out of the station through the terminal back into the station again to get to where the transit goes to the North terminal. After a short ride across to the North terminal, I headed straight to fast-track security, I had a QR code from my prepaid booking which let me straight through. I possibly didn’t need fast track as it did seem like the main queues were moving, but fast track did get me through extremely quickly.
Finding a lounge
I headed to the area where all the lounges were, I had been looking on the train at the various options. Last time I was here there was an easyJet lounge which has now been replaced, with a new lounge called My Lounge. After a bit of research, it seemed like this was quite a nice new addition to the airport and the reviews seem to read well. However, I had discovered the Plaza Premium lounge, which was on the top floor, and had huge panoramic windows looking over the airport. Given this was a spring afternoon, it would be a nice place to go to look at some aircraft, so I decided to plump for that one instead. It was included in my priority pass, so I got free entry. I headed up in the lift, showed my priority pass with my boarding pass and I was in. I found a nice armchair right by the window and got some good views out across the apron. Like other lounges of this type, the food and drink selection wasn’t particularly spectacular. There’s basic beer, wine and spirits and if you wanted anything premium, you have to pay for it. The food selection was okay, and I managed to find myself something suitable for supper. One thing it did have that I’ve not seen in other lounges was an unusual condiment selection which included a selection of herbs and spices and other things like that you might want to sprinkle on your food. Maybe if the food is a little bland you could at least spice it up yourself. The main photo at the top of the article is off my aircraft actually arriving and heading to the gate, which I managed to spot using Flight Radar while I was sat in my seat in the lounge. This was also useful as I managed to work out which direction the aircraft was heading in so I knew roughly where my gate might be.
Speedy boarding
I timed it well, so I headed to my gate area before the gate number was actually announced. Having spotted where the plane was roughly going, I headed to that end of the airport. As I arrived at that section the signs lit up with my gate number and I headed straight down ending up being one of the first people to arrive at the gate. It wasn’t long after arrival that they called speedy boarding. For some reason hardly anybody moved, confused I wandered up to the gate and they said yes come through, only one person got through before me. We were then sent down the end of a long and wide corridor to a set of locked doors. So naturally, we queued up at the doors there. As we brits really enjoy a queue, we of course formed a long narrow queue down this corridor until someone came down, shouted at us and told us to move to the side to fill up the full width of the corridor so everyone can get down there. This made a bit of a mockery of the whole speedy boarding process because whilst most speedy boarding people were at the front near the doors, the widening of the queue meant that anyone could wander down past the people already there and fill up empty spaces near the front. Eventually someone came along to open the doors and apologised, saying they didn’t realise the doors weren’t open and we were sent down to the aircraft.
Being one of the first people on board my hand luggage very easily fitted in the overhead locker and my laptop bag went under the seat in front of me. I was pleasantly surprised about how comfy the seat was and actually my legroom was pretty good. I don’t know if they put less legroom towards the rear of the plane or not? I’d figured I might get peckish and thirsty on the flight, so I’d already stopped into a shop to buy a drink and snack to have inflight. I set up my iPad for my in-flight-entertainment, sat back and enjoyed the flight. It was a short and simple one-hour hop over to Nantes and we landed early as well. The exit from the aircraft was a bit odd we went down the steps onto the tarmac, we were then led into what felt like a temporary building with a very long zigzag queueing system and eventually we found our way to what was clearly a temporary building holding passport control. I was through that in no time and heading out to find where the Uber pick up point was for my one-hour journey over to where I was working.
Return trip
As I was returning on the same flight that my outbound flight had formed earlier in the week, it was quite a late evening flight. Meaning I had plenty of time between finishing work at 5pm and getting into the airport for a 10:30pm take off. So, I decided to take the train back to Nantes city centre, where there was a shuttle bus that runs to the airport. The train was quite easy and enjoyable, I arrived at the main central railway station, which is connected to a bus station. There is a regular airport bus which was a sensible price, and it ran non-stop to the airport itself.
Before flying, I’d done some research on the airport itself, and discovered it had rather unusual layout. It seemed that most of the restaurants were landside, so I decided not to go straight through passport control and security before I had dinner. I had arrived at the airport in really good time and it’s a small airport so I wasn’t particularly worried about the time it would take to get through security. When walked, it was rather unusually laid out in that some gates were in one direction and some other gates were in another, I didn’t know if they linked up behind on air side or not, I guess they probably would, but it wasn’t clear. Either way there were two main restaurants landside, and they were open, so I headed there for some dinner. After dinner I headed round to where my gate was indicated, passed a lady just standing in a corridor with a boarding pass scanner who checked us and then we went through security. On the other side I concluded my decision was the right one as the only thing available seemed to be a Starbucks. My gate number was already indicated so I followed signs to that, which took me into a room where it was one closed gate, but a lot of people sitting waiting at it for some reason, there was a huge zigzag line which led around the corner. I followed this line, with nobody in it, until I got round the corner to find a locked door. This is why all these people are waiting at the gate, they were waiting for that door to be unlocked, I headed back out the queue and joined them at the gate area and watched everyone else do exactly the same thing as they arrived and found the locked door. Eventually locked door opened to reveal the passport control to the non-Schengen area and we went through to find a series of gates for non-Schengen flights.
Once again I had speedy boarding, so I headed onto the aircraft first. This time the boarding process was more unusual, in fact the whole airport has a strange design about it. Once leaving the gate area, there’s a bridge that connects across to a long raised walkway, that goes along the length of the airport. All the airbridges for the aircraft are linked to this raised walkway. We followed along until we got to the end, where there was a barrier stopping us going any further. The crew then proceeded to clear all the passengers out of the gate area onto this long, raised walkway bridge thing and they stacked us all the way along the length of the walkway. Eventually, someone came to the front and let us through where we immediately went out of walkway down a set of steps down onto the tarmac to load onto the aircraft via stairs. Seems to me that it’s more hassle to do all that and have stairs than it would’ve been just to connect the air bridge, but I’m guessing they have to pay more for that. This time I’d selected 2F, I do like to fly on the right on my way home, and to my pleasant surprise it turned out I had the entire row to myself. The seats of this aircraft were slightly newer than the last one and still with plenty of legroom. With the added advantage of nobody next to me so my laptop bag went under the middle seat. Apart from the lack of food and drink service the difference between this and some of the British Airways Club Europe flights I’ve had in the past was minimal. The flight left on time and again landed early. I do question whether they make the timetables so that they always arrive early. The arrival back at Gatwick was very simple, I passed through automated passport control and out to meet my partner who had kindly come to pick me up.
Bottom line
This is my first time flying on a budget airline for quite a long time, and having only paid an extra £6 for fast track and used up one of my priority pass for an outbound lounge, I’d had pretty much a similar experience to what I would have had on a full-blown Lufthansa or British Airways business class flight. The price itself for the ticket was not horrendous for their smart ticket which included all the things like speedy boarding , seats near the front etc, and it was a necessity as I needed to take the larger hand luggage with me for being away for a week. All in all, I have no complaints, it required a bit more research to get myself into a lounge and book a fast track, but the flight itself was perfectly pleasant can’t complain at all. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t mind.
