Hello, my name is Paul Stewart, and I'm currently at Doha International Airport
Where I am about to fly to Turkey with Qatar Airways in their business class product, and a spoiler alert,
I'm not happy about something which I'll explain to you shortly.
Today's three and a half hour journey was initially scheduled on a 787 dreamliner
Although just before my flight it was substituted to an A330 which has a vastly inferior business class product
which I'll mention later on. The journey began at Qatar premium check-in area with first class on the right and business on the left.
It's a really impressive check-in area with this water feature providing ambient sounds and there are plenty of seats to sit on and relax.
Then it's through a separate customs area and then you're released into the main terminal. To find the lounge
Just look for this large teddy bear thing and then follow the signs up the escalators.
The lounge itself is properly massive and this morning it was crowded which limited my ability to get a lot of footage as I consciously
Make an effort to avoid filming stranger's faces.
I'll just mention a few aspects of my experience in this video as I have a separate video which provides a far more
Comprehensive view of the lounge and a link to that will be in the video description below. Since it was around 8 a.m
And I hadn't had breakfast so I went straight for one of the two restaurants
Here they make breakfast sandwiches to order and these tasted perfectly fine
After this
I wandered around to check out the view of the airport apron. In front of you now is a new Boeing 777
And you can check out my review of that aircraft and the new Q suite business class service in another video on my channel.
The exploring continued upstairs where there was another restaurant which had a breakfast buffet.
This is also a bar up here and being breakfast, some grape juice was more than appropriate. After
Some more nibbling. I went back downstairs and relaxed
There's heaps of this comfortable chairs with universal power plugs close by as well as these TV screens which include
Information about your flights as there's no boarding announcements. It certainly is a really impressive lounge and worth arriving early for.
My flight was departing soon, so I headed for the gate.
Our aircraft was at a remote standard so I had to catch a bus
I find the perks like priority boarding ... etc
Are lost with remote stands, but because we had our own separate bus for business passengers, we will all well looked after.
Now just a tease! Our bus took us past a Boeing 787 which was departing for somewhere else, and then
Took us up to our older Airbus A330 - 300. As anyone who's visited
Doha will know it's incredibly humid in september and my camera immediately fogged up, so I had to film this part with my phone.
Here we are on board in Qatar's business cabin, which is set out in a 2-2-2 lay out.
This was normal for 8 years ago
Although now most airlines, including Qatar in their newer aircraft, are moving to a 1-2-1 layout
where every seat has direct all access.
Now let's go through my seat, 5A, in more detail. Fortunately 5B was empty
otherwise
I'd have to crawl over them.
Between you and your neighbour is a small table which includes a larger fold-out table.
And once the meal service has begun you're trapped as there's no room
to sneak out for a quick loo visit. The buttons to adjust the seats are pretty self-explanatory.
And there's this little slide out privacy screen.
This silver thing is a reading lamp and behind that are hours of quality journalism and ads compliments of the in-flight magazine.
Moving over to the other side is a water bottle and noise cancelling headphones.
There's also a USB port and controls for the in-flight entertainment
Which I should add can also be operated by the touch screen in front of you.
In front of you is a small ledge which would fit a foot and above you are reading lamps and air vents.
And one final detail is a universal power plug that's down near your legs.
The friendly crew brought around a warm towel and a welcoming glass of fruit juice.
An amenity kit was also provided which was reasonably adequate for the three and a half hour flight, and
as usual I'll be giving this away to a subscriber and I'll include details of that competition later in the video.
The crew set up for departure and a man with suspiciously pink lips explained how to operate the life vests
The crew were really good throughout the flight and I managed to sneak in another glass of rose grape juice just before the cabin
was cleared for takeoff.
And just to rub in the aircraft change, here is the 787 taking off!
Now this sneaky little bird hitched a ride on route to the runway before presumably realizing we weren't a Dreamliner and decided to fly himself
somewhere else
Now if you take off from Doha towards the north you get a fantastic view of the city as you can see with this footage
I took on board an Airbus A350 a number of years ago, and link to that will be in the video description below.
But unfortunately for me the direction of takeoff changed with the aircraft in front of us, which was this 777.
Anyway, I'll stop talking so you can listen to the takeoff!
One cool feature of having the TV screens so close to each other and not having a neighbour is
You can watch something on your screen and set up the in flight map on the other.
Having had enough grape juice
I went for a traditional fruit juice
prior to breakfast being served. Qatar have a dine-on-demand
service so you can choose what you want and when you want to eat it. As I hadn't eaten anything for about an hour
I had some more breckie. It began with this plate of cold cuts and a selection from the bakery.
Followed by a traditional Arabic breakfast. I've had this a few times with Qatar Airways and it always tastes really good.
This was followed by a warm towel to clean up my face and a cup of coffee.
Now I'll put the food and drinks menus at the end of the video.
Now you probably can't see it that well although I was surprised to see that we flew up central Iraq over Baghdad
Which is an area that most major airlines seem to avoid.
Here you can see the familiar shape of a Tigris River around the university.
We followed the Tigris River north and eventually flew past Mosul, which was under ISIL control
Until late last year, and the city itself is right next to the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh.
Next up was a mid-morning snack of carbonated grape juice and nuts.
I should point out that my seat doesn't have direct aisle access
So if you're not very flexible, you'll need to ensure that you can jump over this
And on the topic of getting past your neighbor,
Which is something I regularly have to do since I have the bladder control of someone who's given birth many times,
here's the bathroom. Now how good was that segue?! It's showing his age but is perfectly fine and stocked with the usual amenities.
Since it comes with a window, it offers the unique opportunity to piddle while watching one of the most famous rivers in history.
By now we were flying over eastern Turkey and getting a great view of the countryside
Now I should mention that I'm always happy to hear from my subscribers
So if you see me at an airport, feel free to come up and say hello.
It's always fun meeting fellow play nerds. I thoroughly enjoyed
Recently meeting fellow youtuber Dennis Bunnik prior to his flight to Tokyo and getting tips on how he maintains such a luscious head of hair!
He does great aviation videos and I'll include a link to his channel in the video description below.
Back to this flight, and away from Dennis's hair, which I'm not jealous about of course.
The inflight entertainment is pretty good with the screen being a good size and decent quality.
The touch feature is quite responsive and the content itself is pretty good.
The only issue is that there's not a lot of privacy if you're the type that watches children's shows or Game of Thrones, I
can see some awkward judging going on there.
As we cloud surfed our way into Istanbul's Sabiha gökçen airport
, and I'm sure I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'll quickly mention the amenity kit giveaway.
You'll have a choice between this kit or the frankly better kit Qatar offers in the new Q suite and to enter simply reply below
Including the text (QatarAmenitykit) in brackets
30 days after this video is published
I'll randomly choose a winner. Full details of the competition will be in the video description below
While I was originally quite cross that my aircraft was changed as I had intentionally chosen this route to check out the
787, the crew certainly made up for it. i've flown Qatar around six times now and the service has always been really good
Now I will mention, though, that Qatar are known for changing aircraft at late notice
And while I understand this sometimes this happened due to maintenance reasons, they often change them weeks or even months in advance
So clearly it's not just planes breaking down.
When you pay a considerable amount of cash for a certain seat you sort of expect it.
I know it's very much a first world problem, but Qatar seem to do this more than most airlines.
Thankfully my 777 flight a few days prior wasn't substituted with an older aircraft as I genuinely flew
via Doha just to check out the Q suite, and by the way
It was really impressive and my review of that is on my channel. And on the topic of my other Qatar videos
Make sure you check out my First Class experience flying in the Airbus A380 from Doha through the Sydney.
Look, the seat itself is perfectly comfortable. Although I've benefited from not having a neighbour
It's not terrible
But certainly not up to the standard of the Q suite in the 777s and new A350s or the suites in the Dreamliner.
The food and drink was great and as mentioned before the service was really impressive.
Overall, the flight was fine and the great crew made up for the average seats. If you enjoyed the video,
Be sure to give it a thumbs up and check out my channel for more similar videos
Thanks for watching and coming up other menus.