Flight Review: Air Transat Airbus A330 Economy Class

Flight #: TS470

From: Montreal Pierre-Elliott Trudeau (YUL)

To: Toronto Pearson (YYZ)

Flight time: 1h 20min approx.

Aircraft: Airbus A330-300

Class: Economy

Quite a few first for me on this flight: first time on Air Transat, first Canadian domestic flight and also, as far as I remember, the shortest distance I have flown on a wide-body aircraft.

In fact, the aircraft was a bit of a disappointment…Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing to complain about the A330-300 that operated this flight BUT, when I booked it (at a very good rate, by the way!) it was expected that it would be on one of Air Transat’s old Airbus A310s. This is an aircraft that I have never had the chance to fly and, and given its dwindling numbers, it is possible that I never do.

But let’s get to the experience itself…

The cabin, as you can see looked really modern, with some cool light effects…although the airframe itself (C-GTSO) is over 22 years old (ex-Cathay Pacific and Dragonair, been with Air Transat since 2011). Surely it has been retrofitted recently, and surely doesn’t show its age at first glance!

The seats themselves were quite ok, 3-3-3 layout, decent seat pitch and back-seat screens.

IFE itself was quite limited when it comes to content choice (and I did not have earphones with me anyway). So I checked the inflight magazine, which is very focused on holiday packages and activities, as it is logical to expect from a leisure-oriented carrier that more or less focuses in flying Canadians to sunny places…

The flight is no-frills, although they serve complimentary water, tea and coffee (something that other no frill carriers also do, and, quite frankly, it is a very simple way to improve the customer experience!)

Here are the earphones I needed to enjoy the IFE! But with just half an hour of flight to go…perhaps not today!

Below you can get a glimpse of the menus and food and drink choices as well as prices (in CAD$ and, of course, bilingual English/French)

Our Take:

To be honest the experience on an hour-long flight is what it is and perhaps this short economy class flight between Montreal and Toronto Pearson is not representative of the longer routes that Air Transat usually offers on this type of aircraft…but overall I quite like it and, even accounting for the absence of frills, I wouldn’t have mind if the flight had been longer (provided I had a good book or some other form of entertainment with me).

I didn’t get to taste the food but my overall experience is that the basics of this Air Transat product are right.