Review of Air Baltic flight from Zurich to Milan in Economy

Recap from the last flight report: To get from Prague to Milan there weren't many options, it basically came down to Lufthansa Group or KLM, but KLM either got into Milan a bit too late on the 29th or left too early on the 28th. So it was a choice between SWISS (with airBaltic on the ZRH-MXP leg) and Lufthansa and I decided to go with SWISS. The price was exactly the same but SWISS left 20 minutes later (so time for a bit more sleep) and it would also let me fly an A220 for the first time. Plus I was expecting SWISS to maybe be a tiny bit nicer than Lufthansa anyway.
I'd flown airBaltic once before, but never one of their leased flights.

The flight from Prague had arrived around 20 minutes early, so when I checked the first screen outside the arrival gate there wasn't a gate yet for the Milan flight. That was at one end of the gate area so I started walking down the other way.
On the way, I passed a SWISS A320 in a Star Alliance livery heading out.

After around a minute I passed more screens, and by then the gate was assigned.

Around another a minute later, I was at the gate.

It was still quite some time until boarding, so I waited at the gate, though to access wi-fi I had to get a code from the wi-fi station which was a few minutes away.
Zürich Airport.

Edelweiss has such an interesting livery.

At the A gates was another airBaltic A220 flying for SWISS.

There's a real SWISS plane, along with Eurowings and Condor.

After half an hour or so, the plane for the Milan flight arrived from Tallinn. Narva, or YL-ABM, a 2.8 year old A220-300.

The next gate also got one.

In the meantime another one pushed back.

Soon after the gate staff started taking carry-ons to check in, which I had already done in Prague.
The announcements said "Star Alliance flight to Milan-Malpensa," not SWISS or airBaltic, which was pretty interesting.
Unlike on the empty Prague-Zürich flight, there was a long line to board. But soon I was heading down.

As I mentioned earlier, this plane is named Narva.

Fuselage.

And here are the seats on this A220.

Here's my seat.

The plane had airBaltic seats, and the mini-screens were in airBaltic colors, but the (nonadjustable) headrest had covers with the SWISS logo.

The seatback design was mostly the same as SWISS.

But the hooks were only on one side of the seat and there was no metal strip unlike SWISS.

The safety pocket had the same SWISS stuff but an airBaltic safety card, and my seat had no sickness bag.

Personal lights and vents. And for some reason, the screens changed from showing an airBaltic "Welcome" screen to arrivals information from the Tallinn-Zürich flight.

As far as I could tell there was no charging available, though there was free wi-fi which worked very well, even on the ground.
Announcements used both SWISS and airBaltic; they said "Welcome onboard airBaltic" and "This is a SWISS flight to Milan."
We pushed back a few minutes late.

Some SWISS and airBaltic A220s.

The full safety video was played in both English and German.

SWISS taking off.

I didn't know Air Dolomiti even flew here.

The main group of widebodies.

Finally the screen was updated to show this flight's information.

A few more planes…

…and we were off.

Sadly, there wasn't much of a view.

Or so I thought. I'd closed the window because it was very sunny, then I happened to look out a few minutes later and saw a magnificent view of the Alps.

Service began with a nice bottle of water.

More great views.

Passes and lakes in the mountains.

The chocolate basket came soon afterwards, it was held out and people could take a few, though I only took one this time.

No buy-on-board cart on this flight.
More Alpine views.

Only a few minutes after the chocolate we passed the last of the Alps, crossing over to the flat plains of Lombardy.

The landscape changed so fast.

We passed Milan and turned back towards the mountains.

Welcome to Milan-Malpensa!

Lots of international planes on the ground in MXP. A lot more than I was expecting, actually, having never flown through Milan since 2014.

We parked close to Cathay Pacific.

And less than an hour after takeoff, it was time to go.

A couple pictures of the seats on the way out.

A few interesting planes on the way to baggage claim, Danish charter JetTime and Romanian charter FlyLili.

Bags took a while to start coming so I used the bathroom in the meantime. It was very small, very crowded, and very dirty.
And it was still a bit of a wait.

When they did start to come mine arrived pretty early on and it was time to head out.
Thanks for reading.
And with this I get gold status on flight-report.com for the first time…