Just a few days ago I wrote about air travel from Europe to Costa Rica. These days I had the pleasure to try out one of the mentioned airlines - MartinAir. Well, this is my summary and personal experience (which is singular as I never travelled with this company before).

• Booking and payment process: fast forward via MartinAir website, got an unexpected, special offer (saved me about 70 Euro); e-Ticket
• Check-in: very fast and convenient (via KLM check-in desk)
• Food & beverages: for all flights good, but it took some time to get something to drink (which is a pain because no fluids brought by the passengers were allowed on the planes!); some dishes had no spoons (drink your youghurt…) and there were no extra spoons available because so many didn’t receive them; the catering service should also check if the main dish is on the plate or not…
• Entertainment: very poor. Mr. Bean is funny, but I saw the short films a dozen time in planes. Isn’t there anything else to show? There were no movies shown and headphones must have been asked for. Instead, MartinAir rented DVD-Devices for 12 Euro per flight (Amsterdam-Miami)
• Reliability: poor. One plane broke down before start in Amsterdam. Ok, this can happen (I don’t know the reason for the failure), but you should be able to organize another plane. Instead of 9pm we arrived at 4am in San José.
• Crisis management and overall organisation: very very poor. Nobody told the waiting people in Amsterdam what was going on. Instead, 6 MartinAir ground crew members waited at their desk for people coming to them (in the same waiting hall) and tell everybody individually what will happen. Rumors came up, and everybody was frustrated. The gates were changed several times, again without informing the passangers. A funny game, and we got some vouchers to get a snack. The same in Miami: somewhere of nowwhere a MartinAir Stewardess handed out Boarding passes before sending everybody to the Check-in desk to re-check-in with all bagage.

I doubt that all flights with MartinAir are as bad as this one. But on the other side, I didn’t see any big effort to make it easier for the passengers. Next time I have to choose an airline for my flight to San José, I will have a second look for an alternative despite the best price.

[Technorati Tags: airline - travel - Costa Rica ]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under FAQs - Frequently asked questions, Surf & travel stories remembered. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.