Review of TAP Air Portugal flight from Paris to Porto in Economy

A visual of my European trip I took in January 2023. Total distance: 4,036mi/6,496km

This trip report's flight route between Paris (ORY) and Porto will take 2hrs 10 mins at distance of 747mi/1,360km

Paris, France

Welcome to another trip report! This is my third city of three that I visited when I decided to embark on my European trek this past January. I decided to revisit one of my favorite European city of Paris as it worked perfectly within my planned itinerary. I've been to Paris twice before (once in spring and once in the summer) but this was my first time visiting Paris in mid January and let me tell you, it was very very cold ?.  Out of the five days I stayed in the city not one day did the clouds led up nor the cold. despite that I did make the most of the trip by revisiting my favorite parts of the city. 

As mentioned before about the weather, it stayed cold and cloudy my whole time in the city. I hoped to get a view of the iconic Eiffel Tower but it remained shrouded in the clouds during my stay.

The absolute highlight of my trip would definitely be my visit to the Louvre which was so memorable. A must visit if your ever in the city!

Day of departure

The day of travel came up and I was ready to head to my next destination of Port, Portugal! This was my first time departing out of Paris-Orly Airport so I was quite excited to experience a new departure out of Paris instead of Charles de Gaulle airport. ORY is closer to Paris city center and I you notice that when taking public transportation. From what I last recalled it took about 40 minutes to reach the airport. I arrived at the airport a little after 4am for my 7am departure and there was already a lot of action going on at the airport.

By looking at the flight info board I realized that the reason for so much movement is that there were a lot of early morning departures out of ORY. 

After confirming my flight on the departure board I proceeded to head to security control.

Security control went by smoothly and I was airside in just over 5 minutes. 

A look again at the departure board and still no gate info. One thing I seriously dislike about when traveling within Europe is that they don't publish the exact gate number only up until when boarding starts. I need to know the logical reason for this. 

Luckily I checked on FlightAware app and it showed that my aircraft had arrived the previous night from Lisbon at gate B16 so I hoped that this was be my gate which it ultimately was. One thing I disliked off the back was the extreme limited seating there was around the gate areas and zero views of any aircraft from any of the gates. Just a few moments after this picture was taken there was a ton of people that congregated in this small space. There was three flights worth of people congested in this small space. As you can imagine it got very uncomfortable very quick.

boarding

The moment of boarding began about 50 minutes before departure. Despite me buying a basic economy ticket I was surprised that I was given boarding group A.

Some information about my plane:
Flight number: TP 459
Aircraft: Airbus A320-214
Registration: CS-TNW
Delivered: May 19, 2006
Age: 17.6 years

I was lucky and was randomly assigned seat 27F at check-in.

As expected there are no PTV's on TAP's domestic fleet. 

These seats offer a tight 28" pitch. However due to the slim design seats you really don't feel it as bad. 

While we still had time on the ground I decided to check out the tray table (and yes I'm wearing gloves as the plane was freezing cold ?). The tray table was a decent size however it was not extendable.  

Next to us is an EasyJet A320 getting ready for it's 7am departure for Toulouse. Flight time: 1h

Just about finishing refueling.

Boarding is completed and the flight load for this flight were 100% full in both Y & J.  

Pushback

We pushed back 5 minutes ahead of schedule followed by a manual safety demonstration by the crew. 

A rare AirFrance A318 in between two Transavia B737's

takeoff

Until next time Paris!

inflight service

About 20 minutes into flight the FA's sprung into the cabin to begin the inflight BOB service. Nothing is complimentary on domestic European flights with TP (only a free cup of water). It's ashamed that they don't even offer complimentary soft drinks as they do in the states, and that's saying a lot ?. A stark difference from my experience on another star alliance airline I flew just before this one with Aegean from Athens to Paris (which you can find here).

TAP does not offer any inflight entertainment (at least on this flight there wasn't). But who needs entertainment when you have amazing views of this early sunrise.  

Flying over Basque country in northern Spain.

initial descent

Rio Douro

Flew right by the city of Porto.

Lining up to land on the runway.

Welcome to Porto, Portugal!

arrival at gate

We arrived at the gate 25 minutes ahead of schedule. 

On last look at our A320, thanks for the safe ride!

This concludes the trip report, thanks for reading!