Review of Volotea flight from Rodez to Figari Sud-Corse in Economy

Introduction

As mentioned in previous reviews, Volotea had recently established a small base in my hometown in the southwest of France, so we took advantage of spending the summer in France to try out another new Volotea route. After a weekend in Paris in July, we headed to Corsica for a week's holiday in August. 

There's a short tourism bonus on southern Corsica at the end of this review. 

Routing

Check-in & Boarding

With a 6:15AM departure time, it was a very early start to the day and we arrived at the airport while it was still pitch dark out. I'm not a fan of early morning flights, but it's so much nicer to only drive 10 minutes to the local airport rather than 2 hours all the way to Toulouse, as we would previously have had to do to fly out of the region. Also, because the Rodez airport is so small, you can arrive less than an hour before departure and still make the flight in plenty of time, which is very convenient!

The landside area of the airport was rather deserted. As we only had hand luggage, we headed straight to security. 

Getting through security took less than 5 minutes as there was no one else in line and only one flight going out at this time of the day.

From the amount of people in the gate lounge, it looked like the flight would be full. It's nice to see these new flights doing so well considering the small size of the city. 

Boarding was orderly with a specific queue designated for Priority Boarding. 

As we had Priority Boarding through our Megavolotea subscription, we were among the first to board. The Megavolotea status also allows for a free 10 kg cabin bag per person in the reservation, which represents significant savings. 

We'd already flown this aircraft, EC-MTD, twice as it was based in RDZ at the time and had taken us to Paris a month earlier. Volotea seem to swap out the aircraft every few months to a new base. 

We were warmly greeted by cabin crew at the door who recognised us from previous flights!

The cabin is fresh, modern, and cheerful with the colourful antimacassars.

The Accro slimline seats are really well designed. Though officially the seat pitch is only 29 inches–typical for LCCs–it feels much more spacious than that thanks to the design carving out extra space at knee level. 

I could even cross my legs easily, which I normally would not be able to do with a 29" pitch.

There's a QR code on the seatback that leads to the Buy-on-board menu through the IFE portal. 

Speaking of IFE, all Volotea planes have free streaming entertainment to personal devices, something that's quite rare even with full service carriers in Europe, much less a low-cost carrier. The upper seatback makes a decent tablet holder for watching content. 

The Flight

Boarding wrapped up rather quickly thanks to boarding through 2 doors. The flight was mostly full except for a few seats in the first rows, which are normally more expensive to reserve. 

The aircraft powered out of its parking stand a few minutes ahead of schedule as the first rays of morning sun were peering above the horizon. 

Lights were dimmed for takeoff and the cabin was bathed in red mood-lighting, surely a nod to the red of the Volotea logo. 

We take heading south and fly right over the centre of Rodez. 

Let's check out the streaming entertainment. In order to access content, the first step is to connect to the VOLOTEA Wi-Fi network. Note that there's no actual Wi-Fi connecting to the internet–this is a local network for entertainment content only. 

The IFE portal can be found by typing play.volotea.com in the browser, or through the menu QR on the seat back and then navigating to the entertainment main page. 

Aside from films and TV programmes, there are also games, travel articles, and the in-flight magazine. 

There's also a flight map, which is quite decent and even has a cool 3D view. 

As far as the IFE content, there's a decent selection of films, series, documentaries, music, and children's programming. Plenty of options considering the generally short flight times within Europe. 

As mentioned earlier, the seatback is the perfect size for holding a tablet. 

Here's a look at the buy-on-board menu. While I find the food prices decent, drink prices are a bit steep, especially for alcoholic beverages. Note that you can pre-ordering combo deals to save a few Euros. 

We'd pre-ordered a snack+drink combo for this flight. 

Almost there!

Oops, I picked the wrong side of the plane for good views on landing–all there was to see was water for most of the flight. 

Then the beautiful coastline of southern Corsica came into view on short final. 

We landed ahead of schedule on a beautiful summer morning. 

No jet bridges at Figari airport, so got some nice views of our aircraft on deplaning. 

While getting up at 4:30AM is no fun, arriving at the destination at 7AM is definitely nice–we had a full day of exploring ahead!

With the early arrival we were at the rental car before the scheduled arrival time!