Review of Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Bangalore in Economy

This report contains two parts, the good and the not-so-bad. (a) GOOD: Thai Airways gift shop, Oman Air Lounge. (b) NOT-SO-BAD: A rendezvous with the old hag, HS-TJW, which would be repeated later that weekend.

In spite of this, this report is one of the shortest I’ve ever published!

NOTICE: From 1 April 2025, all Priority Pass airline-operated lounges at BKK — such as the Oman Air lounge (which I visited) and the Turkish Airlines lounge — will exit the Priority Pass network, leaving only the Coral and Miracle contract lounges.

Cover image: All the things I bought from the Thai Airways headquarters’ gift shop

The best and worst of TG in one trip — awesome gifts and people, awful plane (twice)

This trip report, structure-wise, will be quite different from my previous ones, which were simply a journey from origin city to destination city. Instead this one starts at the Thai Airways gift shop on a Tuesday afternoon in August 2024, then heads to Suvarnabhumi Airport with a lounge bonus thrown in, followed by a night flight to Bengaluru. But the story doesn’t end there…

In a subsequent report (publication scheduled for April 2025) comes the return flight from Bengaluru a few days later — and both of these were operated by the very same godforsaken 777-200ER, HS-TJW a.k.a. Phetchabun, that I’d once hoped never to fly again on my first flight on it in June 2022! The connecting leg to Singapore was also a 777, but mercifully it was the newer -300ER. I’d been hoping for at least one A350 on these three legs, but not only did TG give me even a single A350, it gave me my arch-nemesis TJW on both flights to and from BLR… Okay, enough 777-200ER ranting already. (I’ll save all the ranting for the subsequent report in April 2025.)

As mentioned in my previous instalment on two Cathay Pacific flights from Singapore to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok, my plan to reach Bangkok before noon — so as to visit the Royal Orchid dining experience at the Thai Airways headquarters, which closes at 2 in the afternoon — was scuppered by a mechanical delay on the A350 operating the HKG–BKK leg. By the time I reached the TG HQ on 89 Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, the restaurant had just closed its doors for the day, leaving me mighty bummed… but fortunately there was a fabulous gift shop which made up for most, if not all, of my disappointment. I bought as much cool stuff as I could, from a model A350 to pretty bags to a rich violet T-shirt to a toy violet-and-pink plane-shaped Bluetooth speaker, before returning to Suvarnabhumi. At BKK, I decided to put my Priority Pass membership to good use and checked out the Oman Air lounge, including a sleeping area, for 3 hours.

Tuesday, 6 August 2024, was the very first day on which I took three flights in a single day (CX SIN–HKG–BKK, TG BKK–BLR) and I was determined to make the very most of this unique day. Neither the delay on CX755 (HKG–BKK) which shattered my TG restaurant dream, nor the same old, same old 777-200ER* at the end of the evening, would crush the special feeling — and even the TG flight turned out to be not as underwhelming as that old aircraft would suggest!

*Since late 2024 the Bengaluru route has been getting the older A330-300 more often in addition to the regular A350, and both are leaps and bounds ahead of the decrepit 777-200ER. I lucked out on 26 November 2024 with the same A350, HS-THN, operating both the BLR–BKK and BKK–SIN legs and finally breaking the jinx.

Therefore I scored a hat-trick on that particular aircraft, having already flown that A350 at the end of August 2024 on the one-night weekend trip to BKK. As a result, both HS-TJW and HS-THN appear thrice in my flight log, which no other specific aircraft does.

Afternoon at Thai Airways headquarters, continued — with a wonderful gift shop

Tuesday, 6 August, 2:30pm. Here I pick up from where I left off in the previous report, the Tourism Bonus to be precise, where a mechanical snag on my Cathay Pacific A350 from HKG to BKK resulted in a delay of over an hour. As a result, I was too late to achieve my main goal of visiting the Royal Orchid dining experience — which closes at 2 in the afternoon — at the Thai Airways headquarters on 89 Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, Bangkok. By the time I reached the place, the food counters had been closed and I could only manage to photograph the colourful empty seats.

However, the entire detour to the Thai capital wasn’t about to go in vain! As it turns out — I didn’t know of this beforehand — there was a huge gift shop at the entrance to the building, and this is where I’d spend a good chunk of time and money buying Thai Airways-branded souvenirs for me and my family. I plan to do the same thing at the far more luxurious Cathay Pacific boutique at Cityplaza, Hong Kong, when I visit there at the end of March 2025.

Next to it stood the TG ticketing office. I can’t imagine that a lot of English was spoken in that room between agents and customers, given that Thailand isn’t exactly known for good English skills!

The headquarters’ public Wi-Fi had a swankily designed login page in deep shades of violet, and I used it to look up some interesting arrivals on Flightradar24. This included CX712, the SIN–BKK fifth-freedom flight, which was operated by B-LQH, Cathay Pacific’s final A350. I’ve managed to fly this unique fifth-freedom route — now renumbered as CX630 — for the Women’s Day weekend in March 2025, before its discontinuation at the end of the month.

There were also two departures for Jakarta (CGK) at the same time: Garuda Indonesia’s GA867, the badly struggling Indonesian flag carrier’s only daily flight from BKK — other ASEAN flag carriers have at least two daily BKK flights — and Ethiopian Airlines’ ET628, continuing from Addis Ababa.* In addition, there was a Myanmar Airways International A320 that had landed from Yangon as 8M333, with a company A319 making the journey from Singapore at the same time.

*Now, Africa’s largest airline does not have fifth-freedom rights on the Bangkok to Jakarta sector, and so all passengers on ET628/629 (ADD–BKK–CGK and back) must be flying all the way to or from Addis Ababa. This is unlike the Star Alliance member’s Singapore and Kuala Lumpur flight ET638/639 (ADD–SIN–KUL and back), where passengers can fly exclusively between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. I myself have done this on two occasions in 2023: the late-night ET639 (KUL–SIN) in May, and the afternoon ET638 (SIN–KUL) in July. Another fifth-freedom route that Ethiopian operates in East Asia is Bangkok to Hong Kong (ET608/609), which is also served by Emirates (EK384/385).

Siimilarly, one can fly KLM exclusively between Singapore and Denpasar (KL835/836), or between Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur (KL809/810) — I’ve done both of those — but not between Taipei and Manila (KL807/808).

For the remainder of my stay, I examined every nook and cranny of the gift shop for memorabilia — and what could I not find! Model planes, water bottles, T-shirts, bags, teddy bears, stuffed toys, fridge magnets, eyeshades, even a cute Bluetooth speaker shaped like a toy propeller plane… the list was endless.

Challenge: Try to identify as many TG-branded items as possible in the pictures below!

In the end, the bill came to a hefty THB 3000 (around US$90) for all these items combined, and I’d consider every penny of it well spent. The rich shade of violet is perhaps the single biggest reason why Thai Airways — despite its despicable and decrepit 777-200ER, which I would be flying again that night — is such an all-around adorable airline when it comes to branding.

What TG cannot do with its comparatively poor English skills and entertainment selection, it more than makes up for with its outstanding livery — including the tail camera on the A350, which SQ does not have — and head-to-toe violetification of everything.

It was half-past 3 when I made to leave the TG headquarters, just as a Gulf Air 787-9 landed. The GF165/166 fifth-freedom route between Bangkok and Singapore was scrapped in late October 2024, though the sole Bahraini passenger airline increased its frequencies to Singapore at the same time. With Cathay Pacific also ending its CX630/619 fifth-freedom service between SIN and BKK at the end of March 2025, there are no more such routes between the two busiest airports in Southeast Asia — a sad development…

I managed to fly GF166 (BKK–SIN) in November 2023 — after another horrible TG 777-200ER, no less — and while the cabin, seats, branding and typography were all stellar, the food and service left a lot to be desired. Still, they do very well to position themselves as a boutique carrier, much like Oman Air, which will join Oneworld in June 2025.

Another 787 from the Middle East had also landed, and this — the low-profile Oneworld member Royal Jordanian — is one of many, many airlines that serve BKK but not Singapore. Others from the Middle East include Kuwait Airways, El Al and Oman Air — though the last is planning to re-serve Changi in October 2025, months after joining Oneworld.

With all the shopping done, I went ahead to inform my family about my previous Cathay flight; I’d lied to them that I had flown CX712, whereas I had actually gone via HKG!

Back to BKK: ugly roads and airport, with pretty hoardings of beauty products

A Mitsubishi Xpander SUV was my Grab taxi ride, waiting to pick me up and go back to Suvarnabhumi. This model is decidedly rare in Thailand and Malaysia, and is almost never seen in Singapore. Instead, it is found everywhere in what I call the ‘VIP’ countries: Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines.

I clambered into it, feeling mighty pleased that even though the restaurant trip hadn’t materialised as planned, at least I could make the most of the gift shop by buying so many things from there. As the car turned out of Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, I took as many pictures as I could of the towering TG headquarters.

The more I cruise the roads of Bangkok, the less appealing they are — perhaps because I’ve now become accustomed to the familiar beats of the Thai capital’s skyscape. As most of the billboards are in Thai, a non-Latin-script language, and not English, I don’t bother reading them. But I know what they are all about.

The foremost topic of interest of these billboards is female skincare and, in several cases, facial surgery. Beauty treatments, hospitals, cosmetics… you name it. In India, some of the most popular medical billboards are for fertility and IVF clinics; here, the craze for good looks — among young women in particular — predominates over the rest.

One of them stood out from the rest: the Thai cosmetics company Srichand, which is a very Indian-sounding name derived from Sanskrit, and which I first saw in June 2022 at the Boots pharmacy in BKK Concourse G.

The Mitsubishi Xpander zoomed and zipped all the way east, eventually making its way to the panoramic driveway to Suvarnabhumi’s sole passenger terminal. I managed to catch OH-LTS, a Finnair/Qantas A330-300, landing as QF295 from Sydney — this being one of two A330-300s (alongside OH-LTR, which typically operates QF291/292 to Singapore) that the Nordic airline leased to its Oneworld partner from Down Under.

A necessarily evil: the gloom of grey that is Suvarnabhumi Airport

At BKK, unlike other Southeast Asian hubs, you don’t have a choice of terminals. The good: you don’t need to answer the ‘Which terminal?’ question; the bad: there’s just one awfully ugly terminal. (No, the new SAT-1 satellite building — where my flight would depart from today — doesn’t count.) Unlike Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, where Terminal 3 and 1 respectively are the sought-after ones — don’t bother with KLIA T2 or Soekarno–Hatta T1/2 — there’s no such relief at Suvarnabhumi. It’s a far cry from Changi, which has as many as four terminals, all of which (except perhaps T1) are outstanding.

I wheeled bag and baggage into the singularly ugly building. Given that my flight was on the hometown flag carrier, TG, instead of the tons of other airlines flying to BKK, the check-in counters at Island H were easy to spot.

At the H counters, which TG shares with a dozen other airlines, I noticed a large group of North Indian men chattering nonstop in Punjabi. They were all carrying heavy luggage and were all headed to Delhi (where else) on TG315, after what I presumed to be a boys’ trip. They made for a sharp contrast with the elegant, sophisticated (also North Indian) couple ahead of them, and it was only after the entire rigmarole was finished that I was able to put through my baggage — including all the goodies from the Thai gift shop.

Very few things about BKK are pleasant, and the security check ranks near the very bottom of the list. After removing metre upon metre of charging cables from my backpack — and still managing to get my bags flagged for a reinspection — I scurried past passport control and towards the sprawling luxury retail area as fast as I could.

In terms of aircraft movements, the same CX712 which had landed from Singapore would now return to Hong Kong. There’s never a shortage of interesting arrivals at this airport, now matter how awful it is otherwise: a Bhutan Airlines (not Drukair) A319 as B3700 from Kolkata in India, continuing from Paro; a Kenya Airways 787-8 as KQ886, which would continue to Guangzhou; an Aeroflot 737-800 as SU650 from Novosibirsk — the Russian flag carrier flies to BKK from secondary cities like Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok — and the aforementioned Qantas/Finnair (should I call it QFinnair?) A330-300 and Gulf Air 787-9.

Meanwhile, my mom did what she often does best: ‘advertise’ an institute of higher education — in this case ETH Zürich — in the hope that I might pursue a Master’s! (Which I will, but back home in India, hopefully an MBA at the prestigious IIMs.)

Once at the windows, which were no less hideous than the rest of the building, I managed to spot a CX A330 and the Kenya Airways 787 that had been resting for awhile. I walked past the antediluvian arrivals display — no, not the feel-good vintage clickety-clack that Changi T2 had prepandemic — and towards the main retail spaces.

King Power duty-free shop after King Power duty-free shop later, I finally reached the concourse I wanted: Concourse F, where I had first encountered that Boots pharmacy back in June 2022 on my first Thai Airways journey ever. I went down a level, where all the lounges are located.

Oman Air Lounge BKK: A solid (if small) airline-branded Priority Pass* lounge

*Not any more from 1 April 2025, as this and other such lounges at Suvarnabhumi, like the Turkish Airlines and Air France–KLM lounges, will leave the Priority Pass network.

I knew beforehand that I’d be coming here, thanks to its showers and sleeping areas. In a few months’ time, in Juy 2025, the Oman Air Lounge is going to have the big blue Oneworld logo at its entrance — joining the Cathay Pacific First and Business Lounges, JAL Sakura Lounge and Qatar Premium Lounge at BKK. (The last of these is opening a new QR Premium Lounge in the SAT-1 midfield terminal by the end of 2025, replacing the existing one.)

I sauntered into the lounge, showed my Priority Pass app details to the friendly hijab-clad agent — Thailand has far more Muslims than I’d imagined in this overwhelmingly Buddhist kingdom — and got the Wi-Fi password before turning right into the seating and dining area. Immediately it struck me: this lounge was going to impress far less with its small size… and far more with its solid food selection! The décor wasn’t bad by any means, fitting the boutique feel of the airline as a whole, but it certainly wasn’t dressed-to-the-nines…

(For that matter, the first lounge I ever visited, in June 2022, was the nearby Miracle Business Lounge in Concourse F. I paid to enter as I didn’t have Priority Pass at the time, and while the seating and ambience were decent, the food was rather subpar.)

I put down my bags, lounged around for awhile, got my food (which I’ll get to in a bit) and busied myself reading Singaporean miles-and-points blog The MileLion’s review of this lounge. Perhaps the single biggest draw of this otherwise modest lounge is the champagne selection, which is rare for a Priority Pass lounge — as the review shows — but I don’t drink, so it made no difference.

’No, do not adjust your screens. Some Priority Pass lounges have prosecco, others cava. But a Priority Pass lounge with champagne: how often do you see that?’

With BBC News playing on the TV, I settled in for some okayish apron views — not too great, given the bad spotted windows (again, this isn’t Changi!) — where I managed to spot a pair of sister planes: Lufthansa and Austrian.

Austrian is another airline that flies to BKK but not Singapore — more surprising given that it’s a Star Alliance member from Europe, with LOT Polish Airlines being yet another such BKK-not-SIN example. But Singapore Airlines’ budget subsidiary Scoot, also visible in the pictures below, will start flights from Singapore to Vienna in June 2025.

I tucked into the hot food offerings, ranging from fried chicken satay to roast duck curry to Arabic options (moutabel, falafel wrap, labneh) to some vegetarian curries and noodles, and heaped my plate with them all. There were also four kinds of juices: rosella (!!!), pineapple, orange and apple. (Full resolution here.) All-in-all, I quite enjoyed the delicious spread of food, but since I’m a teetotaller, I didn’t care for the champagne.

I especially liked the cute emojis that Oman Air had placed beside a QR code for feedback, with this setup being placed at the long window with two iMacs overlooking the action at the apron. I would have gone to the sleeping rooms sooner, but the lounge attendant said that they weren’t available yet, and she would inform me when they were ready, handing me a blanket in the meantime.

As the clock neared half-past six, two premium A330s lined up for takeoff in quick succession: the Finnair/Qantas (‘QFinnair’) A330 for Sydney, and a Starlux A330-900neo for Taipei. Curiously, the Bhutan Airlines A319 (A5-DOR) also showed up on Flightradar24, which is unusual since neither Bhutan Airlines nor Drukair fly after 4 in the evening, always resting overnight at foreign destinations!

I forgot to take pictures of the shower room, but it was nicely appointed with a shower gel and shampoo, and I took the opportunity to refresh a bit there. There were, however, no towels — a bummer!

At a quarter to 7, I was informed that one of the two sleeping rooms was now available, and I was led to the section of the lounge that’s reserved for Oman Air business/first-class passengers and Sindbad elite members. I was led into a small darkened room with a lamp and very flimsy curtains, and honestly they did a terrible job of blocking the noise and light from the room outside. As a result, I could only toss and turn for a long while before my eyes finally closed, waking up at 7:45. This, I should say, was my only real complaint with the Oman Air Lounge BKK, as I was subjected to the constant stream of conversation from the (mostly Arab) passengers.

This SAT-1 is not a German TV channel — it’s a relief from BKK’s ugliness

At 8 in the evening I exited the Oman Air Lounge after thanking the lounge attendants for their gracious service. Regarding the bad light/noise insulation in the sleeping area, it obviously wasn’t in their control; they did the best they could. Too bad this cute little lounge is no longer in the Priority Pass network — what a shame!

To my pleasant surprise, I found out that my flight was departing from the new satellite terminal, called SAT-1. (If you happen to be German, rest assured that this has nothing to do with Sat.1 — one of Germany’s biggest TV channels, owned by the ProSiebenSat.1 group — and this rather unfortunate name, with a hyphen, is the result of some very incompetent Thai airport officials.)

Suvarnabhumi has an Automated People Mover, or APM, that runs between the main terminal and SAT-1 — much like how the Aerotrain at Kuala Lumpur’s Terminal 1 between the main and satellite terminals works. (Or used to, until it was closed in March 2023 for a two-year-long renovation… so I’ve never been able to use it, always shuttling by bus instead.)

Some captions and a WhatsApp screenshot, and (at far right) a picture of art in the men’s restroom in the SAT-1 terminal.

It goes without saying that SAT-1 is infinitely nicer and more pleasant than the horrible main terminal, whose only redeeming factor in terms of décor is the rows of glimmering King Power shops and luxury brands after passport control. However, I couldn’t revel in its beauty for too long: Gate S116A, where my flight would depart, already had a long line of passengers queueing up beside the nearby Burger King. (As it turns out, both my TG flights in November 2024 (BLR–BKK–SIN) would use this gate as well, breaking my TG A350 hoodoo when departing BLR.)

I was in such a positive state of mind that not even the 777-200ER — which I was half-expecting, anyway — could burst my bubble, not even the fact that this was the very same HS-TJW that I’d sworn never to set foot on again in June 2022. But I was much more flabbergasted when the exact same aircraft turned up later that weekend to operate the return sector from Bengaluru as well, giving me an unfortunate troika of three flights on the old beast!

For the record, Unterföhring (as my caption states) is the suburb of Munich where the ProSiebenSat.1 broadcasting group is headquartered.

It’s TJW time again, baby: Boarding and departure

Flight: Thai Airways International TG325/THA325
Date: Tuesday, 6 August 2024
Route: Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (VTBS/BKK) to Bengaluru Kempegowda (VOBL/BLR)
Aircraft: HS-TJW, Boeing 777-200ER, named Phetchabun — as flown before in June 2022 — which would also operate the return sector TG326 on 11 August.
Age: 16 years 10 months at the time (first flight: 21 October 2007, delivered: 29 October 2007)
Seat: 36F (aisle, starboard side)
Boarding: 8:55pm Indochina Time (ICT), UTC +7 (7:25pm Indian Standard Time (IST), UTC +5:30)
Departure: 9:35pm ICT (8:05pm IST)
Arrival: 11:05pm IST (12:35am ICT)
Duration: 3 hours

Notes:
• Third flight on the infamous Thai Airways 777-200ER, with the fourth coming on TG326 later that weekend on the same aircraft. As a result, after the next flight, HS-TJW achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first aircraft on which I had the misfortune to fly on three times.*

The only 777-200ER other than TJW that I flew was HS-TJR, Thai Airways’ oldest aircraft today, in November 2023 — which was also (sadly) my only HS-registered aircraft (i.e., from Thailand) for the whole of 2023. (This was followed by a Gulf Air 787-9 from Bangkok to Singapore, a fifth-freedom route that’s now discontinued.)

*In three months’ time, A350 HS-THN became the second aircraft on which I flew thrice: first on SIN–BKK on 24 August, and then for both legs of BLR–BKK–SIN on 26 November. That would be the very first time, in four attempts, I flew a non-777-200ER from Indian shores at night to Bangkok.

You can see how much I hate the Thai Airways 777-200ER for all the pain it has caused — especially in August 2024, when I was supposed to break the 777-200ER jinx, but instead the agony was prolonged further.

I knew the drill by now: old 4:3 screen, fiddly grey remote, dull yellow cabin etc., but there was one thing that — despite my overarching aversion for TG 777-200ERs — I found too interesting to resist snapping. This was a video for Thai Select, a new hallmark for authentic Thai culinary products, which I could only grab the final few frames of.

At the next gate stood HS-THZ, the airline’s latest A350, and it sure would have been nice to have scored a hat-trick of A350s — the other two being from Cathay Pacific — on my very first three-flight day. But I can never quite escape the clutches of the Thai Airways 777-200ER, can I?

For a change, instead of my typical right-hand window seat, I opted to sit in the central section’s aisle seat (36F) as there were far more seats available there and I could afford to stretch out.

For once, I could afford to talk about the 777-200ER in a sardonic, dryly humorous way with my family instead of fuming with rage about it — which I would do the next time around, later that weekend!

As I remarked wryly, ‘The right approach is to pretend that this is IndiGo (no screens, no charging) except on a bigger plane.’

The 777-200ER flight that refused to disappoint!

As an Air Premia 787-9 from Seoul came to rest at the adjacent gate, Phetchabun, the old crone, whirred those nearly-17-year-old Rolls-Royce engines of hers and took to the night skies, ending an up-and-down day of adventure in the Thai capital.

Some 45 minutes after takeoff, the non-vegetarian meal was served, and this was the Thai basil chicken option with an omelette on top. It was a bit too spicy and ‘pepper-corn-y’ for my liking, but at least it was a substantial dish. This was so much better than the so-called ‘Indian non-veg’ meals that Thai Airways serves departing India, where the extent of the non-veg aspect of is a single slice of tandoori chicken wrapped in aluminium foil, and the curries are all vegetarian.

There were a number of sides, like cut fruits and — a first on my flights with TG — salted and roasted almonds. The real highlight, though, was the ondeh-ondeh pandan cake, which really hit the spot. I’d no way of knowing the exact description of the dessert, though, as SQ and Emirates are the only airlines I’ve flown which make their Economy meals available online well before boarding. All-in-all, the meal, and the dessert in particular, kept me more than contented, and prevented the flight from becoming another wretched TG 777-200ER experience.

I might mention here that the IFE (outside the moving map) was non-functional for the first hour or so of the 3-hour journey, but then the old 4:3 system sputtered to life. The irony of the Thai Airways A380 ad at the bottom of the language selection menu wasn’t lost on me, and of course the onscreen food menu wasn’t ever expected to load either.

It’s sad that TG retired so many older planes — A340-600s, 747-400s, 777-200 and -300 non-ERs, even the A380 superjumbo — but not these 777-200ERs. These were in their late ‘teens’ (built 2006–2007) and hence somewhat younger than the 747s and non-ER 777s, the last of which rolled off the production line in 2003 and 2000, respectively. That said, of the six 777-200ERs, HS-TJU was never brought back to service after retirement, while HS-TJS was withdrawn from service in February 2025 — so there’s still some hope!

Still, I needed to entertain myself somehow, and to my surprise I found a fairly recent selection of popular music. Having once listened to it on my more disappointing KLM 787-9 flight from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur in June — yes, that flight was comparatively worse despite this being a much more ancient aircraft! — I picked Venus by Zara Larsson. Immediately I got into the rhythm of peppy tracks like Can’t Tame Her and, especially, Ammunition, which I’d been hearing on and off on the radio in Singapore.

The best thing was that even though the picture quailty was (naturally) atrocious, the sound quality on this old plane was very much up to par, especially since I used my own earphones and not TG’s.

When I was done with the music, I opened my iPad’s Netflix downloads section and saw the acclaimed rom-com Jab We Met at the forefront of the recommendations. As it turns out, the movie — one of the most popular rom-coms in 21st-century Bollywood — was released in October 2007, at the same time as this aircraft was built!

I took the opportunity, with only half an hour left in the flight, to scribble my jam-packed journal entry illustrating all the ups and downs of my first three-flight day. The bummer of missing out on the TG restaurant was more than compensated by the gift shop and Oman Air Lounge.

Some three hours into the flight, after circling a bit above the Bengaluru skies, the old beast made a smooth landing at 11 at night. Interestingly, the outdated onscreen map showed the city’s old HAL airport as ‘Bangalore Hindustan’, which was replaced by the current Kempegowda airport in 2008.

Another 777-200ER — a bit older (2004) but much better renovated — would land shortly after us: PH-BQI as KL879 from Amsterdam. As the pilots took their own sweet time to motor along to the terminal, I flipped the old black remote with its clunky buttons and, strangely enough, a credit-card swiping slot.

As always, the only reading materials on TG are the Thai Sky Shop duty-free catalogue and the safety card, with the Sawasdee magazine having being converted into a digital format along with downloadable pocket guides. I decided to pinch the catalogue from the seat pocket as I left the plane; no one would notice anyway!

I would have loved for this to be my final rendezvous with Phetchabun… but as it turns out she had one more planned for the same weekend, to take me away from Bengaluru in a much worse way than how she had brought me here now.

BLR T2: India’s newest terminal (before Navi Mumbai and Jewar) — and it shows

There’s never a bad moment when entering the arrival corridors of Kempegowda International Airport’s glamorous Terminal 2, no matter how poor (in this case) or good your plane might’ve been.

Arrivees are first welcomed by Infosys, the city’s original IT bellwether, which now shows a running montage of Rafael Nadal and Iga Świątek hitting their tennis balls above the immigration counters. And then the Dufry-run Bengaluru Duty Free with its mechanised ear-flapping elephant, and eventually the baggage claim, all four belts of them.

At length I reached the opulent 080 Arrivals Lounge and Café, before turning right into the row of fast-food restaurants (Cothas Coffee, Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s) that line up the arrivals area. With those elegant chandeliers and with that posh woodwork, there’s never a moment where I don’t feel thankful for having escaped nearby Chennai’s horrible government-run airport and shifted to this exotic place.

It was half-past midnight when I got into an Uber sedan, after a prolonged wait that exposed me to chilly winds. This route — from the airport, lying northeast of Bengaluru, to my parents’ home in the southern fringes (not the other way round) — is my most frequented Uber journey in India.

On this comfortable night ride, I could afford to stretch out as the driver whizzed past all the hoardings — including Air India’s new service to London Gatwick — and all the way down into the city. It had been a most energetic day that started more than 24 hours ago at Changi Terminal 4, waiting to board a Cathay Pacific A350 to HKG, and now I needed all the rest I could get!

Well after I reached home at almost 2 at night, I made an interesting comparison between the underwhelming KLM 787-9 flight two months before (CGK–KUL in June 2024) and this Thai Airways 777-200ER that actually managed to exceed my low expectations — which is more than can be said for the woebegone return journey on the same aircraft later that weekend!