Eurostan

[Scarlett]

LX1451 SJJ-ZRH
ERJ190-E2 Y
HB-AZG
On time

Time to start the journey home with a flight back into central Europe on Swiss’ regional carrier Helvetic.


Aircraft arriving at SJJ as viewed from the airport business lounge and its outside terrace (not open unfortunately).

These flights were a one way LX cash ticket SJJ-ZRH-GVA to connect up later in the afternoon with my return TK J ticket to get back to south east Asia.

Booking LX gave me *A benefits and some flight options for redundancy on the connection. If all went well the morning flight to ZRH would be followed by an after lunch connection to GVA and then five hours until the return part of my international ticket. I’ve used up all my bad luck for the next decade so that was all going to be fine.

SJJ is a small airport so getting checked in and through to the lounge was quite simple. Interestingly there are both a business lounge and a premium business lounge run by the airport. I went to the business lounge and had boarding pass scanned there, but even with a whY ticket, my *Gold status apparently meant taking the lift up to the premium lounge. It was comfortable and had a small but adequate selection of food for breakfast, although coffee and drinks were behind a staffed counter.

The flight was called for boarding and it was a through a bus gate. The same gate as when arriving.


This is the bus waiting at the gate. That’s the aircraft about 200m away, but we need a bus to get there because as we all know:


There was a bit of faff waiting for a second bus load of pax to arrive. Not sure why as there was hardly anyone left at the gate when I went through so not sure where they were all hiding.

Climb out. A view with no winglets/sharklets is unusual, although I guess you could argue these raked wingtips are they same kind of thing anyway.


No great views over Eastern Europe and only a short 1.5 hour flight then we were landing at flughafen ZRH.

Last point to note is that I had selected seats when booking the ticket but LX changed the seat on me twice in the week prior to the flight. Randomly, the first time I went and moved myself back to seat I had selected (row 9). The second time there was no real better option available than the row 14 I was ‘assigned’. No apparent reason why when on board. The same thing happened on the second leg but with obvious reasons which I’ll cover next post.

 

[Scarlett]

LX2806 - ZRH-GVA
Bombardier C-Series 300 - Y
HB-JCT
Half an hour late departing - on time arrival

I spent the hour transit in the Swiss lounge (A gates) as this flight was due to depart from the B gates and that seemed the closest lounge. Understated but a nice well catered lounge. This meant a 10 minute walk around to the gate at boarding time. Another bus departure gate but this one was necessary as the aircraft was a couple of minutes drive away.

For this flight Swiss had again sent me two emails advising that my selected seats when booking had changed. Both times I reselected another different seat from what they’d allocated me. I think I went from row 9 to 11 to 12. At check-in in SJJ I’d been allocated row 17 and told that was all I could have… hmm. On boarding it became obvious (well sort of) why. There were a cast of a million paxing crew! All in uniform. I counted three in business and then another about another 15 spread around the first six rows of economy! Not sure why they all have to be at the front of economy as after arriving at GVA they all stayed on board whilst other pax alighted.


Crew. Crew everywhere.

Maybe this should be a separate thread but, other than world domination, what is LH groups plan for all of its various member groups? As we were pushing back there were these two Edelweiss jets parked adjacent.



So does Edelweiss just cover low yield holiday markets? Sort of like a German JQ. And Air Dolomiti covers low yield markets from Italy like a QFLink as does LX for Switzerland, OS for Austria, SN for Brussels etc. Where will AZ fit in that picture? And what is this new LH City? Is that a Germany based QFLink equivalent? @Mattg is this something you could break down and explain in Australian terms?

Our flight time was advertised as being 25 minutes for this short domestic hop. Who knew that ZRH-GVA was shorter than CBR-SYD? The Swiss cities are about 50Km closer together than those Australian two.

Much like the QF A220, I found the legroom on this aircraft to be tight and I wouldn’t like to spend more than a short haul journey on it.

Into GVA, collected bags pretty quickly, then upstairs to find the TK check-in counters.

 

[VPS]

That is the annoying part about travelling alone that you go through amazing scenery and can't take photos. I did suggest that someone needs to invent a camera mounted to the roof (in a weatherproof dome) and then it opens up like a flower and the camera pops up when you tell your app and then you can use your app to swivel it and take a photo.

Who knows one day it may come true. Loving this TR btw