Juliette Sivertsen flies from Auckland to Nadi aboard Fiji Airways FJ410
The plane: Airbus 330-200.
Class: Economy.
Flight time: Three hours.
My seat: 12B, so almost within sniffing distance of the business class meals. I don’t exactly have the longest legs in the world but I felt like I had plenty of room to stretch out underneath the seat in front of me.
Fellow passengers: It’s a two-four-two layout so I got an aisle seat and one other person next to me in the window seat. Being a Monday lunchtime in mid-NZ winter, it was a fairly full flight with a reasonable number of what appeared to be holidaymakers and a few people heading back to the motherland.
Entertainment: Personal inflight entertainment device, which you don’t always get on a Fiji Airways flight to and from New Zealand. I was pleased to see Bohemian Rhapsody among the movie options as I hadn’t seen it, and was silently rocking out to the top hits in my seat while my neighbour slept the entire flight. There’s also the Fiji Time in-flight magazine, which had a great section on visiting Christchurch, under the page title Australia. (First Phar Lap, now this . . . — Travel Editor). The service: Friendly Fijian service as always. Food and drink: A surprisingly tasty chicken curry, a surprisingly cold bread roll and a little Tymo biscuit, which is like a coconut flavoured Tim Tam.
The toilets: Compact but fine.
Luggage: 23kg checked luggage.
The airport experience: It was only a small change, but it’s nice no longer having to sign the departure cards, which means heading through security is unbelievably easy and fast. I did nearly get a little lost trying to find my gate but that was because I was on the phone to my Mum absorbing all the “be safe” parental messages and got distracted.
The bottom line: Comfortable service, no complaints. But I really wish Fiji Airways had something more vibrant than brown as its signature decor. I get why they’ve chosen that colour, but no matter how new and slick the plane looks, the brown patterned seats will always give me flashbacks to viewing grainy photos of my Dad in brown flares and big glasses.