Review of Vueling Airlines flight from Birmingham to Paris in Economy

a detour on a detour

Hey guys and welcome to the first FR of another series!

This series, comprising of 10 flights and 8 FRs, will cover my recent trip to Canada. This is a trip that I've wanted to do for a long, long time now and it will include my first long-haul flight since the pandemic and will also be my first time in North America. But first, we'll kick things off with a flight… to Paris… from Birmingham.

Yes, if you've read any of my previous FRs you'll know that I never like to travel from A to B the easy way and will try my hardest to find the most convoluted itiniary possible. In this case, I'll be travelling from London to Montreal via Birmingham, Paris (ORY & CDG), and Vienna, totalling 36 hours of travel. 

This will be my first time flying Vueling and will also be my first time flying from Birmingham and into Orly. As for price, I paid €75 including a checked bag and seat selection.

As a side note, this flight took place on my 20th birthday, which was definitely an interesting way to spend a birthday.

From 2023, I aim to offset all of my CO2 emission from flights. All emissions are calculated using the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator and I will be funding projects approved by The Gold Standard. The CO2 output for this flight is:

BHX-ORY: 62kg
Total for 2023 (so far): 347kg.

getting to the airport

Living in London, I will first have to take a train to Birmingham. Luckily Birmingham Airport is very well served by trains from London with express trains taking around an hour and local trains taking 2 hours. 

London Euston, one of the capital's (many) terminus stations and is for all trains heading up the west coast to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Here's my train for the next 2 hours. I chose the local stopper mainly because it was much cheaper than the express (£5 vs £20).

Birmingham International railway station. This is the station serving the Airport.

View outside the station. This is actually my 2nd time here, the first being a planespotting trip back in October 2021.

The airport and the train station is linked by a free monorail service, which is super convenient.

birmingham airport (bhx)

As usual, I arrived way too early so let's explore the airport before check-in opens.

Outside view of the airport.

The arrivals area, its very crowded mainly because of the arrival of an Air India flight from Amritsar (ATQ).

Check-in zone A. This (quite obviously) is the check-in area for Jet2.

The departures for this afternoon.

Check-in zone B. This is the check-in area mainly for TUI and Ryanair, but also for a few other airlines like Air India today.

Walkway connecting zones A & B with C & D.

Check-in opens only 2 hours before departure. This isn't a lot of time to begin with, especially looking at the size of this queue.

Yeah… this is gonna take a while (especially with only 4 counters).

Check-in took about 45 minutes. I honestly feel quite sorry for the staff, they really tried to get through everyone as quickly as possible and appeared super stressed.

After check-in came security, which took a further 30 minutes. It's quite clear to me that the airport is seriously understaffed. Hopefully that is only a short term issue coming out of the pandemic but I honestly can't recommend flying out of BHX unless you enjoy the stress of missing your flight. 

Duty free area. At this point I had around 5 minutes until boarding started so I didn't get to explore the airport airside at all really.

The departures area. Like all UK airports, passengers are expected to wait in this area until their gate is announced. I've made it very clear in the past that I absolutely despise this system as it crams everyone in a tiny area with very little spare seating while leaving the rest of the airport deserted. It's for this reason that a lot of my most hated airports are in the UK.

At least the airport has a fairly wide variety of shops.

View of the gates.

Stopped to get a quick (and horrible) picture of the Air India 787-8 (VT-ANA) heading to New Delhi (DEL). This is the one that arrived in from Amritsar (ATQ) earlier.

the flight

Boarding started pretty much right after I got to the gate. Sadly there really wasn't a good view of the plane.

Our flight time will be around an hour and here's our route for today:

Some information about our plane:

Type: Airbus A321
Registration: EC-MMU
First flight: June 2016
Age: ~7 years

Nothing too interesting about the plane, she was delivered to Vueling in July 2016 and remained with the airline ever since.

The seats on this A321, it's very similar to what you'd find on easyJet.

Back of the seat.

Legroom - not too great (they are a LCC after all) but also not the worst I've had.

First views out of the window. An Emirates 777-300ER (A6-EPE) just arrived from Dubai (DXB).

Completely unrelated sidenote, but it was only until Emirates revealed their new livery that I realised their current livery wasn't 3 random stripes but in fact formed the flag of the UAE. I've been looking at that livery ever since I was tiny and never once did I form that connection, kinda blew my mind when I first realised. 

Anyway, because check-in was completed so late, baggage loading only began 15 minutes before our scheduled departure time. This resulted in us pushing back 40 minutes late despite boarding finishing on time.

Taxiing to runway 15 for departure.

Takeoff! Bye bye UK.

Nice views of Birmingham and its surroundings on takeoff.

Really not much to see after the landing lights are turned off.

Lets have a look at the contents of the seat-back pocket!

Oh… for some reason none of the seats in my row had anything in the seat back pockets but looking at the other rows, there's a BOB menu and a safety card. 

However, Wi-Fi is available for this flight.

And this is the price:

There wasn't much to see out of the window until we started our descent into Paris Orly.

Amazing views of Paris at night.

Welcome to Paris! Despite our delay leaving Birmingham, we only landed 20 minutes late.

Parked at the gate.

paris orly (ory)

Despite the strikes at the airport today, Orly was still incredibly efficient. It took around 30 minutes to go from the gate to landside.

Baggage reclaim area - its amazing how modern the airport is.

Arrivals area.

With a super early flight to Vienna tomorrow, I planned on heading straight to Charles de Gaulle airport on the RER and Orlyval. As modern as the airport is, I found the signage to be fairly confusing. It led me to the upstairs check-in area but the signs for the RER just seemed to stop. This meant that I had to walk around the check-in area randomly, hoping that I'd eventually stumble across it. At least it gave me an opportunity to photograph more of the airport so that's a bonus… I guess?

One of the check-in areas, I'm not sure which one this is as I was too preoccupied searching for the Orlyval to pay attention.

Finally! I found a sign. The arrivals area had signs pointing to the RER + Orlyval but the departures area upstairs only had signage for the latter. Maybe it's just me but it took me a good 10 minutes of aimlessly wandering around to find this.

And it was a complete waste of time. Turns out there aren't any RER trains today because of strikes. This means that I'll have to take a bus to Paris and then a taxi to Charles de Gaulle.

The bus stops outside of the airport.

This concludes the first FR of this series. I will continue my trip in my next FR, which involves another hop in the wrong direction to Vienna. See you there!