Review of Volotea flight from Paris to Rodez in Economy

Introduction

Welcome to the second part of this quick series of French domestic flights with Volotea. For some more in-depth background on the choice of airline, route, and booking of flights, see the outbound flight review here.

After a lovely weekend in Paris, it was time to head back home to the south. There's a short tourism bonus at the end of this review.

Routing

Reviews in this short series:

Check-in & Lounge

We arrived at Orly Terminal 1 by taxi about an hour and a half before departure. The ride from our hotel in the 16th Arrondissement near the Trocadéro was about €35 and took around 25 minutes at this early hour (we left the hotel around 6AM). 

The flight was showing on time in the Volotea app, but no gate was indicated. 

There are touchscreen information boards in the terminal with flight information, in addition to traditional screens. You can scan your boarding pass to see your gate information. 

As we only had hand luggage and had checked in on the Volotea app, we just went straight to the security checkpoint. Orly T1 doesn't yet have the new machines so we had to take out all larger electronics and liquids, but it went rather quickly as there were few people ahead of us in the queue. 

We even had time to head to the lounge before boarding!

The Premium Traveller Lounge is located one floor down on the tarmac level, which makes for some cool views. We had access to the lounge with Priority Pass. 

I was pleasantly surprised at how now the lounge was for a third party lounge in a terminal serving mostly Low-cost carriers. 

It was larger than expected with several different seating areas and was really quiet the time we were there.

We had the entire section by the windows to ourselves as there were only a handful of other people in the lounge. 

I wasn't hungry as the Sofitel had packed us a to-go breakfast with our earlier departure, but the food offering was similar to that of the lounge in Toulouse–mostly snacks, morning pastries, and one or two hot dishes. 

The inbound flight was running on time, though it had to do a few holding pattern circles over the Paris suburbs before landing. 

Boarding

We headed to the gate about 5 minutes before boarding time. As our gate was one of the closest in the concourse, it was a short walk from the lounge. 

The boarding queues were a little confusing as there were 3 lanes but only two arrows on the monitor pointing to Priority boarding on one side and Standard boarding on the other. We went to the furthest left of the 3 hoping that was the correct Priority Boarding lane–it turned out that it was. 

In typical efficient LCC fashion, we began boarding before the inbound passengers had finished deplaning so we were held in the jet bridge until the last passenger was off. Volotea are very efficient at quick turns as the cabin crew assist the cleaning crew in getting the cabin ready as people are still disembarking so that passengers on the next flight can enter as soon as the last person from the inbound exits. 

Within a few minutes we were able to enter the aircraft–very efficient operation!

Volotea proudly display their Skytrax 4-star rating at the boarding door. 

The cabin is simple but bright, fresh and modern. 

We'd booked the exact same seats for this return leg, the furthest up front of the less-expensive seats. 

Volotea's Acro slimline seats are very well designed. They are comfortable and reasonably well-padded and offer a surprisingly good amount of legroom due to the seats' design carving out space at knee-level. 

Officially the seat pitch it a standard LCC 29 inches, but it honestly feels more like 31" as I can cross my legs easily–something that shouldn't be possible at 29" pitch (I'm 5'10"/1m78 tall). 

It was a rainy Monday morning–luckily we'd had beautiful weather most of the weekend. 

There's a QR code in the seat-back leading to the buy-on-board menu and in-flight entertainment portal. 

Here's a look at the full buy-on-board menu, which has some decent options and reasonable prices, in my opinion. 

The streaming entertainment to personal devices is available from gate-to-gate. 

In addition to video content, there are games, destination information, news articles, magazines, music, and a flight map. 

There's a good amount of video content including movies, TV series, documentaries, and children's programming. Though the library isn't huge, it's more than sufficient for the short flights Volotea operate within Europe. I love that they offer streaming IFE, it really sets them apart from the rest, especially when most European legacy carriers don't offer IFE on short-haul, much less LCCs!

The Flight

Boarding wrapped up quickly and doors were closed. 

The aircraft pushed back from the gate a few minutes ahead of schedule. 

Taxi time was very short as Terminal 1 is located close to the runway. 

As mentioned, there's a flight map in the IFE portal. 

The map also has a cool 3D view. 

The in-flight service began shortly after the aircraft levelled out. I'd pre-ordered a Drink+Snack combo for this flight, which is slightly cheaper than buying separately on bord. 

With barely an hour in the air, the flight went by very quickly. The aircraft began its descent over the Aubrac Mountains. 

A stormy day throughout much of the country, though there were more breaks in the clouds as we neared the destination. 

The aircraft flew south of Rodez to line up with the runway, making the turn over the Pont-de-Salars lake. 

We flew right over the city on landing. 

I was hoping to see the city centre and beautiful Cathedral, but it wasn't visible as it was directly under. 

We landed in RDZ ahead of schedule. 

As there are no taxiways parallel to the runway, we had to make a U-turn at the end of the runway and taxi back up most of its length back towards the passenger terminal. 

Being in row 6, we were off pretty quickly. 

Bye EC-MTD, see you in a few weeks for another trip! ✈️