TAP Air 232 - IAD to LIS
Bom dia! Welcome to my first ever flight report. I've been a fan for a while and I'm excited to make my first contribution. Any and all feedback is appreciated.
I had downloaded Flighty for the first time, and while I enjoy the app quite a bit, I completely spaced that it displays the departure time of the flight, not the boarding time. As a result, while we enjoyed a pleasant silver line trip out to the airport from downtown DC, we were forced to rush through the airport and as a result I got a lot less photos of Eero Saarinen's beautiful design. As would become a recurring theme on this trip, my wife and I would get very little time to explore the various airports we would be traveling through.
Today we would be flying on an A321 LR to Lisbon, before carrying on to Rome. Our ultimate destination would be Porto (OPO) to visit the in-laws, but it was cheaper to fly to Rome and then take a different flight from there. This is my first ever time flying TAP, but I was excited to see how narrowbody flight across the Atlantic would be as this seems to be an increasingly popular type of plane for airlines to fly on these types of routes.
Because of my mistake regarding the departure time, I didn't get a chance to snap any photos of our plane at departure, and was too hurried into my seat to get a good shot of it before sitting down. We had paid for extra leg space economy, and boy am I glad we did! At six foot four inches tall (~183 cm for the Europeans reading this), the extra leg room felt extremely necessary.
I believe these are the Recaro CL3710 economy class seats (I'm not an expert in seats but this seemed to be what it looked like googling). The seat itself is pretty comfortable, although as soon as anyone reclined, there was almost not room and the IFE was only a few inches from your face. I did appreciate that the adjustable headrest had significant vertical range so I could find a comfortable height for myself.
Space under the seat was quite tight, but my wife and I managed to make everything fit just fine for the flight. Shortly after getting seated, we we were on our way to Lisbon. On the less great side was the piece of gum that was stuck to the safety card in my seat.
A quick look at the provided pillow and blanket, headset, and in-flight wifi options. I ended up not purchasing wifi this flight, as I had downloaded several movies that I wanted to watch. I did opt for the free messaging and it said I had a limited amount of time to message, but it worked the entire flight. The flight was pretty warm, so I didn't end up using the blanket at all, and probably should have stored it overhead in the cabin.
About an hour after the flight had departed, the service started. We were given a small chocolate to start, which was tasty. Our options were supposed to be a chicken with mushroom roast or a pasta with cheese. There must have been some issue with catering because we were instead given the option between Thai red curry chicken or a pasta. I opted for the chicken, and my wife chose the pasta.
The red curry. Overall, this was mostly inoffensive, but certainly nothing to write home about. The dessert was pretty good, sort of a raspberry cheesecake. The curry didn't really taste too much of curry, just sort of chicken with rice and vegetables. The bread was fine.
This was the pasta, it had the same sides as my meal. My wife said this was mostly enjoyable, nothing special either. We did both appreciate that there was real silverware.
Some lowlights included a dressing for a salad that wasn't there (why include a dressing for a pre-dressed potato salad?) and the fact that my spoon was quite dirty.
After the meal the flight attendants collected the trays. Shortly after, the captain announced that because of turbulence, there would be no post-meal service. I was surprised as for the rest of the flight, I felt almost no turbulence at all. The seat belt light stayed on the entire flight though and the crew did not appear again until we were close to landing.
The IFE (I forgot to take a photo of it) was pretty reasonably sized and had good resolution. It was adjustable, which was necessary when someone reclined in front of you. The seats had pretty good recline, but the relatively tight legroom means the IFE is basically a few inches from your face. The selection of movies was pretty small, but my wife was able to find some things she enjoyed.
Shortly before we arrived, the crew turned on the lights and came through for a pre-landing snack.
Apologies for the poor quality here, I was quite tired.
This is really where the catering issue at IAD was apparent - the pre-arrival snack was three slices of whole wheat bread with some cheese and mayo, paired with a single nature's valley oat bar. It was a bit of a baffling choice for a morning snack, and after flying back with them from LIS a week later, clearly not what the airline normally serves.
We landed in LIS shortly after. Boy, this is an airport I hope to never spend much time in again. Not only do you have long taxi times and significant time spent in a bus getting from the tarmac to the terminal, but once you arrive there is very poor signage for arrivals and passport control. Almost the entire flight had to ask an EasyJet employee where to go to connect to their next flights, as TAP And LIS had no indication of what to do.
Welcome and thanks for sharing your first review! On a cool route and unique aircraft as there aren’t a ton of recent reviews on the TAP A321LR.
Haha totally get it! A 100% legit AvGeek routing!
Good thing you paid for the extra space seats. Economy on long-haul already sucks when you’re average height; I can’t imagine how awful it must be at 6’4”!
Overall TAP long haul economy service seems fine. They’ve often got really good fares so it seems decent for the price.
Personally, I think it’s cool that Dulles gets so many of these Transatlantic narrow bodies. A lot of people complain about being in a narrow body on long haul but honestly it’s fine. I used to fly Icelandair a lot so I was used to flying long haul on narrow bodies, plus now most airlines run A321LRs and XLRs which have wider cabins and seats than 757s and wider seats than many wide bodies even.
I have an Iberia A321XLR future booking from IAD that I’m really looking forward to!
Thanks again for sharing and welcome!
Hey Kevin! Thanks for your reply and warm welcome! And yes, it was very much an AvGeek routing :)
Yeah, fine it the best way to describe it. I can't really fault anything in the hard product, the seat was totally comfortable and the price was reasonable. My main takeaway is there really isn't anything special about the airline - although I don't fly transatlantic too often, but since the In-Laws are in Porto now I'll be making trips over there much more often and am excited to compare some other offerings!
Oh this is very much a flight I'm interested in taking. I fly Alaska quite often so I have a decent pile of points saved up, I really am interested in their business class product as I've seen a few reviews on the A321XLR and it looks quite nice. I've also never been to Spain so a stopover in Madrid would be a treat! I look forward to reading your review when you take the flight!
Thanks for sharing this look at TP's Y product and welcome to the site. I really like TP because of their fares, but as your report highlights there are a lot of gaps in their offering from the larger European carriers and LIS is really in desperate need of some help. There are likely few options in Y that would be comfortable at your height unless you were on an Asian carrier that still provides passengers with dignity (33-34" pitch). For these short TATLs, the catering quantity looks decent, though visually the quality does look suspect. TP crews are definitely hit or miss.
Interesting perspective, I've only flown them in J for TATL routes, but find their catering and branding to be very on point. As a pseudo-LCC in Y, maybe a lot of those integrations are absent, but would assume that ex-LIS catering would be better and a lot of the complaints are really down to IAD's catering.
Thank you! You’re definitely right that for TATL in Y it’s slim pickings for leg room. I don’t fly TATL too often, but next time will probably looking for J seats at least for a red-eye like this.
That’s fair, and I need to finish writing up our return trip because the catering ex-LIS was definitely better. I think I was in a slightly sour mood due to the flight crew and a lower leg injury I’ve been dealing with that exacerbates a lot of the issues with limited space. I really struggled writing this review because it was overall a pleasant flight with a good hard product, but just felt like there were quite a lot of misses that would be easy to correct for the airline. I suppose viewing them from the lens of LCC maybe would be more forgiving.
Thanks for your reply and feedback!