This must be the worst domestic flight in the UK. Seriously.
If you are thinking of getting this flight for a weekend in Edinburgh – don’t bother. Half the weekend will be gone before you get there.
I had the misfortune of working in the East Midlands for four weeks recently. I booked the sister flight to this on the Sunday night and booked this flight to get me home again on the Friday.
Out of 4 weeks this flight arrived on time only once. The remaining three flights arrived between three and four hours later than they should have.
Bmi target business travellers and have a pricing policy to match; bmibaby is the opposite of this brand. They target leisure travellers, specifically once a year travellers looking for a week in the sun. You could say (indeed I clearly do say) that bmibaby play on the inexperience of their target Customer.
They clearly flout EU Regulation 261/2004 in regards to passenger rights with several staff members fundamentally lying to me (don’t worry – I got my cash). The “Duty Managers” at EMA are pathetic – they have no interest in you, and indeed on one occasion the manager hid upstairs and left the very young and inexperienced staff member to deal with 100-odd passengers who had promised broken yet again. Pathetic.
The issue is that they only have one standby aircraft. As the average age of their fleet is 15.1 years, the standby aircraft is in use most of the time. That means that they run late. Very late. bmibaby.com know that they can normally fly passengers to Glasgow, fly them back to East Midlands and then use the same aircraft to get passengers from the WW51 back up to Edinburgh BEFORE the 3 hour cut-off set by the EU. On the occasion they miss the deadline they have the cheek to call it an “extraordinary” event and try to get out of paying anything…Despite it being habitual. Makes me so angry.
Anyway this is meant to be a review…
Leaving the ridiculous delays aside what can you expect? Not much. You get to your destination. The actual flight time is around 50 minutes. You can buy some overpriced booze (£3.50 for pretty much everything) and if time allows you can have a melted curry. They half the price of the “fresh” food on the last flights of the night so if you fancy a gamble then it may work out to be better value than at the airport.
Flightstats.co.uk (who compile copious amounts of statistics on flights) comment:
“This flight has an on-time performance of 0.2%. Statistically, when controlling for sample size, standard deviation, and mean, this flight is on-time more often than 3% of other flights”.
There really is nothing else to say. If you need to travel from the East Midlands up to Edinburgh then consider Flybe who fly out of Birmingham – they are not my favourite airline, however they are infinitely better than bmibaby.
You have been warned.
Aircraft: Airbus A330-200
Class: Budget Economy
Price: £64
Arrival gate: 5
