[Anonymous]

[essjay35]

Our flight to Mexico with Thomson got off to a bad start.

We had booked one of Thomson’s Premier hotels which allows extra hand luggage weight – 7kg, and so packed accordingly. We used the night-before service at Gatwick and were “greeted” by a very unpleasant, sullen, unfriendly member of staff at check-in who insisted we were only entitled to 5kg. I pointed out that we had booked a Premier hotel and so were entitled to an extra 2kg, but she insisted that she had just been told that it was now only 5kg and that we had to repack our hand luggage.

I felt that it couldn’t possibly be right and have since taken it up with Thomson’s Customer Services, who confirmed that our hand luggage should have been 7kg and have apologised to me.

We had a two hour flight delay, which was disappointing as the flight itself was eleven hours long. We decided to book extra legroom seats (or extra space as they now like to call them!) On our outgoing flight we had seats 20F and G. These were emergency exit seats and were great, loads of legroom, and perfectly comfortable, on our return journey we had seats 14A and B, not so good, by the toilet bulkhead, but still comfortable enough.

We upgraded our flight entertainment (£5 each), which offers extra films and a pause/rewind/fast forward facility. On the return journey the flight entertainment information leaflet was showing a new selection of films, one of which I was particularly keen to see, so we upgraded again.

However, a mistake had been made and the films showing were actually the same as on the outgoing flight, so we asked for a refund. There was also a problem with the in-flight entertainment and it was not working for quite a long period. We were not too worried about in-flight entertainment coming home, as it was a night flight, so a lot of time spent sleeping.

The food on the plane was fine – in-flight meals are never going to be fantastic are they? I preferred the meal on the return journey, a chicken tikka which I thought was quite tasty.

We did notice on the return flight that passengers in the premium class cabin were coming through to use the toilets in economy, so I assume there was a problem with the toilets in their part of the plane.

All in all we found the flight to be comfortable, the plane did seem a little cold and we did use the blankets provided. We flew long haul with BA, Premium Economy, a couple of years ago and I have to say I found this flight more pleasant. We found the cabin crew all to be very friendly and helpful (what a pity the same can’t be said of the check-in experience).

Both of us suffered really bad jetlag on our return – something we have never experienced before! We have previously flown long-haul with Virgin and BA and have been perfectly fine, no jetlag at all.

I’m interested to see that next year Thomson will be flying the new Dreamliner to Mexico, one of the benefits of this plane, they say, will be a reduction in the effects of jetlag.

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