Avis du vol entre Zagreb et Doha en classe Economique avec Qatar Airways

Welcome to the fifth flight report of the Balkans series. In this flight report, I cover the return flights home to Singapore via Doha.
This is flown in economy class on Qatar Airways. Will Qatar Airways be consistently good on the return flights? Or was I lucky twice to get good crew? I was eager to find out.

Before flight: Zagreb Franjo Tudman Airport

We arrived in Zagreb airport 3h before flight departure. The first impression I get is that this is a modern airport.

We checked in our baggage and went into the departure zone.
I took some pictures of the airport.
I found the airport very modern.
My criticism is for the non-schengen zone. There are 5 or 6 gates from what I remember, but only a small set of toilets to use. The male toilet only had 1 urinal and 1 toilet cubicle. That is hardly enough if all the gates are used.
However, I enjoyed the zone of portraits right after security. There are plenty of brilliant people from this part of the world and their contributions were stated underneath their portraits in Croatian and English.

Inflight experience

Our QR218 flight was operated by a 12.9 year old Airbus A320, A7-AHT.
Each seat came with decent legroom for my 1.77m frame.
Window seats came with an IFE box obstructing the legroom though.

Seat pocket contents included a safety card and a vomit bag. There is no inflight magazine or inflight shopping magazine.

Seating arrangement for QR's A320 is a standard 3-3 in economy class. The flight was around 60% full today, so some lucky passengers like myself had an entire row. This made the flying experience very pleasant.

The plane began to pushback and I took some pictures of the airport.
I also took some pictures of the takeoff. Flying is always pleasurable for me!

After cruising altitude was reached, the cabin crew began service by offering rice crackers and drinks.
All alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks were on open display on the cart, allowing passengers to make an informed choice to get intoxicated or not.
I obtained a screwdriver for myself.

The meal service soon followed.
Starter was a potato, corn and pea salad which tasted fresh and delicious.
An 'infused' bread came with the meal, which I found to be rather dry. I wish QR will provide butter for their bread instead of infusing butter into them.
Dessert was a chocolate brownie with caramel sauce if I'm not mistaken. The brownie is on the dry side, with the caramel sauce almost solid and did nothing to moisturise the brownie.
I am still amazed at QR's generosity of 3 choices for main course. For our flight, we had
1) Soy sauce chicken with rice. My mother and I picked this and we enjoyed our meal. However, it's not as tasty as the versions we have in Southeast Asia or even China.
2) Beef stew with parmesan polenta and carrots. My father picked this choice and enjoyed it.
3) Vegetarian pasta of some sort.

I then requested for more drinks when my tray was cleared. I obtained a bloody mary and cranberry juice.

I went to the galley to request for a coke zero and was given a biscoff to go with it.

After meal service, Qatar Airways set up a snack bar for peckish passengers. I helped myself to a kitkat.
This is very generous for a 5h flight as I can't think of any airline offhand that offers a snack bar in economy class for a 5h flight after the main meal service.

I enjoyed the view outside with my snacks.

I took a photo of Turkiye when I saw these mountain ranges.

Doha Hamad Airport at night is nice to look at. The flight took a u-turn after this and landed.

A last look at A7-AHT, the plane that brought us to Doha. This was a good experience in an A320 and I don't like flying on narrow bodies normally…
We got a bus gate this time. I don't understand why, since there were many vacant gates around.

After alighting from the bus, I saw a QR A380, an increasingly rare plane. Hopefully I get to try it someday.

We entered the terminal building with around 4h left for transit, which is plenty of time in DOH. The transit experience will be elaborated in the next report.
Thank you for reading!