After we went through transit security, I was shocked to see how boarding began 90 minutes before boarding…Does anyone know whether QR does this regularly? I still managed to visit the so-called “Jewel 2.0” at DOH, but this is nowhere as amusing as the one at SIN (I’ve been to both, and the one at SIN is 10000x more superior than this one)
I quite like the displays at DOH, which shows a nice picture of your destination for the majority part of the screen.
In regular DOH fashion, the bus ride took 30 minutes and I was surprised to see how they boarded economy passengers before everyone else…
Today we’re flying on A7-BOC, ex B-KPP. This plane carries the 1997 special retro livery, and I’ve been wanting to fly on it for a while! Of course, with this being a remote gate, I got an amazing view of our aircraft tonight!
My seat tonight, 61C. I won’t go through this seat in too much detail as I already have gone through it in my previous reviews. (Both on QR817 or my Tokyo trip reports).
Good legroom as one would expect. This is what I’m used to! They also distributed amenity kits on this flight.
Sufficient storage compartments!
Finally a touchscreen IFE…Our destination of “HGK” should just be a typo, but I didn’t bother telling the crew as they had much pressing issues to deal with, which I will mention later.
Safety card
And the map. Of course, the system couldn’t recognise where “HGK” is!
QR uses door L2 and L5 for boarding, which I found a little weird…It is a completely full flight though, with every single seat on the plane being taken.
Anyways, this is where things started going a little South for us…There was a HK passenger whom apparently showed symptoms of fever, which was reported by a few passengers on the bus ride to the plane. With one of them being a doctor (crew said he showed his doctor license), the crew and other passengers were frightened and determined that she should get off the plane. However, the passenger (in her 20/30s) and her mother refused and argued with the crew, which caused a minor delay to our departure.
The paramedics of DOH were also involved and got to the passenger. Upon further questioning and negotiation between the passengers and the crew, the paramedics told the passengers to sign a form on their device (which I presume is a declaration form…? I’m not too sure what that is) and granted departure clearance to our flight. At that point, our flight was already delayed by 30 minutes so passengers sitting around them were not that happy…Thankfully, our parking stand was extremely close to the active runway so our arrival wasn’t delayed in the end.
At 4am (????) DOH time, brunch was served…Who the hell eats brunch at 4am??? It was just 9am in Hong Kong, so I did not understand the choice of meal at all…
Wanting to eat some comfort food, I picked the beef meatballs with rice. It came with a bowl of fruit cubes w/ syrup, and some yogurt with strawberry jam. The meal came with the same old piece of bread, which I’ve had for 5 or 6 times already.
I apologise for the horrible photo quality…I don’t really function at the weird hours…
The main dish was flavourful and tasty, especially the vegetables! The side dishes, as expected, tasted weird. The yoghurt was both very sweet and sour at the same time (the jam could very well be renamed as strawberry syrup!), and the fruit was not fresh at all. It wasn’t too big of a deal though as I was not hungry at all.
After the meal, I fell asleep shortly and woke up feeling nauseous. I typically don’t get nauseous from flying, and seeing that my travel companions felt the same, I realised that we probably caught food poisoning from the meal on the previous flight as we did not eat anything at the airport prior to this flight. I had to visit the toilet frequently as I was also suffering from diarrhoea, but it was a shame that I put all my medicine in my checked bag so was unable to retrieve any of them…I ended up sleeping on and off, sliding my entire body into the space in front of me to simulate sleeping on a fully flat bed…
What’s worse, the 2nd meal was served right when I really felt like vomiting…From my observation though, lots of passengers skipped the 2nd meal as it was just 3 hours after the first one. With the short flight time, I feel like a snack instead of a full meal at 4 am DOH time would work better instead of wasting most of the meals.
Anyways, we landed on time at HKG after 7 hours and 2 minutes. I started to feel better upon landing and (thankfully) didn’t vomit (or I would probably have been sent to a hospital for isolation considering where I was coming from). The bags didn’t take that long to arrive, and I was out of HKG in 30 minutes, going back home to rest.
Overall, this was a pretty good flight with comfortable interiors and good seats. The food was alright and I didn’t deduct points for the food poisoning part (since it’s the fault of the previous flight, not this one), but they do serve a little too much food for passengers…
The crew are still friendly and good, but they didn’t go the extra mile like how I would expect from the “World’s Best Airline”.
To sum up my 4 flights, QR is a decent airline, but not worth extra time/money to try them out. They’re solid, but I would not recommend people to fly with them again unless they happen to be a quick and cheap option to get from A to B.
