[Metty]

NorthernLass wrote:

We came home this morning, but I will definitely check it out next time!

@Metty, we actually got some nice dipping oils for Xmas; I’ve just had a look and the label says “Charlie & Ivy”. Also “Made in Yorkshire”! I’ve been using them on salads, the chilli, garlic and ginger one is lovely.

@NorthernLass @Peggerz @OldStoat thank you all, will try all of your suggestions 🙂

[Metty]

NorthernLass wrote:

@Metty, the obvious answer is to plan a trip to Umbria to source the original product!

You can sometimes get nice olive oils online from Selfridges or Harvey Nicks.

Yes, that’s the best idea 🙂 Prefer Umbria idea to Oxford Street shops online/in person but will have a look there anyway, thank you.

I speak as someone who did a trip to a cooker hood manufacturer in Milan as the one we liked was £600? in John Lewis but £350 in Milan. First problem was getting a hire car big enough for the thing (Fiat big square thing like a giant Nissan Cube did the trick), then the amusement at the factory and language and then turning up at check-in for the flight home with a monster box. Luckily bmi didn’t seem to care and it actually arrived home in one bit!

[Metty]

Random Monday question regarding those little 17ml bottles of Monte Vibiano olive oil that are offered on BA, Qatar etc in the pointy end of the plane.

The producer’s website has various options for buying e.g. 10x 10ml bottles; this wouldn’t last too long in our house.

There’s bound to be someone on here who is a connisseur of such things, can anyone recommend a spicy lemon/chilli extra-virgin oil that is available in a bigger bottle. Have tried various Waitrose/M&S products over the years but nothing as nice as the above 🙂

[Metty]

yorkshireRich wrote:

I will be flying in Y. My flight from Doha to Phuket is on the Boeing 777-300 which was an Ex Cathay Pacific aircraft.
Thanks to my RJ status I have selected the comfort plus + seats. I believe they used to be the Premium Economy seats on Cathay Pacific.

Cheers
Rich

Apols…must have pressed report rather than Edit on my first reply, doh.

@yorkshireRich coincidentally I’ve just been chatting about the Qatar B777s that ply the Doha-Phuket route in the rather fun 8/5 Runway Cafe here in Phuket with a Thai Lion F/O who’s flown down from Bangkok for the day with his +1. It’s the three ex-Virgin Australia B777s A7-BOE/F/G that almost always do the route, so if looking for the best Y seats on Aerolopa, it may be that the config is different for the ex-Virgin to the ex-Cathay? The ex-Cathay aircraft have F seats whereas the ex-Virgin don’t.

[Metty]

yorkshireRich wrote:

My flight from Doha to Phuket is on the Boeing 777-300 which was an Ex Cathay Pacific aircraft.
Thanks to my RJ status I have selected the comfort plus + seats. I believe they used to be the Premium Economy seats on Cathay Pacific. Anyone have any experience flying in these seats. There will be 3 of us and we like a window but the seat map on the app looks like there’s a gap between the seats. Im sure it won’t look like this when I’m on the aircraft but thought I’d see anyone as first hand experience.

Cheers
Rich

@yorkshireRich forgive me, but as I’ve just spent an hour at the rather fun 8/5 Runway Cafe in Phuket with random aviation people including a Thai Lion F/O who’s flown down from Bangkok with his +1 for the day chatting about the Qatar visitors, I believe that Phuket QR B777s operations are almost exclusively the ex-Virgin Australia ones, A7-BOE/F/G. You can tell them from the ex-Cathay ones as they have no F seats. So if looking at the best Y seats on Aerolopa it may help in case the ex-Virgin layout is different to the ex-Cathay. Cheers, Ian

[Metty]

davefl wrote:

Can’t remember who mentioned using “imshi” rather than “la shukran” but used it this morning with a particularly persistent individual and they went away laughing rather than taking offense.

So thank you.

Glad that it had the desired effect and glad you got a laugh rather than a punch! 😀

[Metty]

Ihar wrote:

Andrew. wrote:

It’s just the same as being on the train and someone having an open chat on their phone. Join in the conversation, take minutes if it is interesting or if you think a competitor might be interested. “Sorry, could you just say that again for my notes?”

Always like to say “Hi” on work calls/video calls being “broadcast” for all to hear. Even more enjoyable the usual response: “Do you mind, this is a private phone call!”. It shouldn’t be for us peons to call out people (esp kids with parents present) that using a device on speaker isn’t acceptable. Cabin crew and restaurant staff, etc, should be shutting it down pronto.

Yesterday on Qatar the guy in the seat behind me was streaming something on speaker. When crew came round with standard ‘welcome back…if there’s anything I can do…’ I replied with a request to ask passenger to use headphones or desist. Given the guy had a full on DYKWIA rant at the crew on taking his seat because he was a Platinum, usually in 1A, yadda yadda and Qatar crew may be trained in routine formulaic interactions but possibly not with confrontation de-escalation I wasn’t expecting much. To their credit, the crew doubled up and told the guy in no uncertain terms to use headphones or switch it off. And then apologised to me for the disturbance. Well done!

[Metty]

AndrewT wrote:

A belated thought on this one is that the free WiFi applies to all BAC members, so there’s nothing to stop you creating an additional account with throwaway email address and password instead of using your real account.

I usually use another family member’s BA logon as have some history of Finnair overwriting my BA number with the AY one upon connection to on board wifi. No reason to believe BA’s would do the same but now I’m crediting to Qatar I don’t use my own logon. If I can connect at all of course.

[Metty]

Regarding my logging on issue this week, every time I did get a Hotspot Shield (VPN) warning that ‘insecure wifi detected, turn on Hotspot Shield’ which obvs wouldn’t work without connectivity.

A friend said they deleted their Hotspot Shield app, restarted phone and that cured the problem.

Not being a tech expert and reading the above replies it sounds like Hotspot Shield runs in the background and was saving me from myself?

[Metty]

strickers wrote:

I have probably a 20% success rate, it’s utter garbage.

I did try a complaint via ba.com on Tuesday regarding free messaging not working on a wifi equipped a/c. BA’s AI kindly said that it would refund me £0.

I wonder if latest iphone update doesn’t like the open wifi and/or BA’s certificate. I can’t put a VPN on without wifi….

It’s not important, just another strand to everything BA being such a lottery when it comes to ‘customer experience’.

[Metty]

AndrewT wrote:

I guess it’s free in the sense that you don’t have to pay in order to find out it isn’t working!

.

😆😆

[Metty]

freckles wrote:

Just 1 x 5k points

Nice to hear you can win more than once though

A bit of a surprise! But I did make a booking in between the winning spins. I can’t imagine that they programmed this in to the algorithm but…

[Metty]

adwoot wrote:

“Review” if anyone is interested for future reference…!

PE outbound and not much to report, pretty standard service. Though we asked two crew members what

P.S. in response to an earlier poster, these flights do not have onward legs to Pakistan. Also curious that they only seem to use two specific aircraft on the route, V-JAZ and V-TOM.

Re G-VJAZ and G-VTOM it took a while for me to get to the bottom of why those two were the only a/c on the RUH (and used to be Lagos too) route. By chance I was seated beside Captain Chris on a BA TLS-LHR flight who is a well known VS Captain and instagrammer, nice guy, offered to buy all the aviation geeks a beer on arrival at LHR. He flies the planes but had no idea why. Other posters suggested it was that the ‘lady’ logo on these two is more moderately dressed.

Turns out that these two are owned?/operated by a sub-company called Virgin Airways International, so the route licence is presumably with them and not VS mainline.

[Metty]

Qatar can be flaky with awarding points and Avios; on a recent Avios redemption via BA we were credited Q Points and Avios for DOH-Beijing but not LHR-DOH which was same PNR/ticket 😀

[Metty]

ClubSmed wrote:

CurliQ wrote:

OK, after much faffing around using different products I have finally got the 5x bonus boost.

Could you (or someone else who has managed to resolve this issue) please post the steps you went through to do this?
I am still struggling after resetting several settings and trying multiple browsers.

I tried all my Apple products (iPad, iPhone, Mac) in normal/incognito, clearing cookies etc and doing random things like using VPN. No joy whatsoever. I am lazy and expect the machine to do what the human wants, so avoid Microsoft if at all possible as e.g. why should I have to deal with ‘Virtual Store’ files etc. I digress… so tried a Windows laptop and it worked first time.

[Metty]

AndrewT wrote:

It’s an LHR three class aircraft with Club Suite. The LGW fleet are 77S and 77T.

Yes, you are of course correct!

[Metty]

I have no objection to use of humans or AI to determine damage that the renter has caused, but as I for once was absolutely certain we didn’t cause any damage I do object to being scammed, the damage should have showed up previously if recorded correctly. I suspect the next renter got charged for the same thing we were.

Anyway Amex Insurance coughed up for the whole damage charge within 24 hours of claiming, excellent customer service, which is OK for us but it’s now Amex that are being scammed. Rental was in my travel buddy’s name as I’m still on Amex’s naughty step 🙂

[Metty]

@Lady London thanks, will try Hertz Global, never mind the €40 for the ‘damage’ they added a €50 admin fee too.

I don’t think I’ve come across ‘Confessions of a Car Rental Agent’ on forums but it would be interesting to know what incentives the employees have for fleecing customers and alienating folks from the brand.

[Metty]

ukpolak wrote:

Thank you @Metty very helpful.

I wanted something similar for Westray / Papa but I am quite happy to remain onboard for the return leg immediately if that works for loganair. Online booking insists on a 40 min connection time so I may call to see if the customer services centre can do anything!

Fwiw the locals in Papa Westray (PPW) suggested that the Loganair folks in the inter island office at Kirkwall were used to dealing with such issues – look for the ‘Czech In’ sign 😏 but maybe the old fashioned call may work, I doubt the Loganair call centre is outsourced! Obvs if you had one way tickets into and out of PPW that gets around the 40min rule, just explain on the day that you want to stay on board. Not sure whether you are price sensitive but I think the fare was cheaper if you stay over, but clearly you’d spend more than that on accom.

[Metty]

@ukpolak it was individual bookings apart from Kirkwall-EDI-SOU, I can’t recall why, but am conditioned to doing one ways! BTW last time I did a Barra daytrip, Loganair consolidated two flights into one, meaning we had to go out and back on the same a/c rather than have an hour or two there. Not sure how common this is…

@yorkshireRich thanks!

[Metty]

@ukpolak Excellent! Hope that you get time in Barra to walk across the hill behind the terminal at Barra to the rather nice beach 🙂

[Metty]

Saltrams wrote:

@metty I note you stayed at the Alexia Suites and I had already marked this as a joint 1st choice but how did you book your stay? You said your alternative was full…were you just winging it? They appear fully booked out most of next season 😠

@Saltrams we ended up in the Alexia because I emailed the Amelia info@hotelamelia.com as was presumably a Lonely Planet recc; Bakhodir (‘Bakh’) replied said sorry, full, but they have a sister hotel. He has these emails in his signature block; I’d email them and I’m sure he’ll sort you out whether full online or not! fay-bahodir@yandex.ru
jama120@mail.ru

Amelia Boutique Hotel
Alexia Suite Hotel
1, Bozor Hoja Street
3, Chitbofon Street
Bukhara , 200118

Trip sounds great, please post a trip report and maybe we’ll copy you in a year or so!!

[Metty]

Michael C wrote:

Fab report, @Metty – hope to be doing this in April with my
son, though will need to study timetable as you suggest, to see
if we actually stay over on the island or not.

Did you buy the Papa Westray flight far in advance, and was it full? Cheers!

Bought tickets in June, as I recall it is a cheaper fare if you stay over on the islands and for the sectors that we flew, Kirkwall-Papa Westray 3 pax (aircraft going on to North Ronaldsay with 4 pax for there. On the return trip, the aircraft had 0 pax inbound Kirkwall-Papa Westray and 7 pax boarded the return, one got off at North Ronaldsay, nobody else boarded, so 6 of us North Ronaldsay to Kirkwall.

Perhaps Loganair may save some seats for locals as getting to e.g. hospital appts in Kirkwall by ship is tricky as there’s only one or two direct services a week so the other days it means a ferry to Westray > bus across island > ship to Kirkwall. Several hours trip each way vs 15 mins flight.

Even if doing a day trip this may be useful Papay Tours

Papay-Westray ferry timetable
Orkney Ferry timetable
Orkney Ferries fares

Posting too many links may not work so that’ll do for now. If need photos of the hostel accom, pretty scenery, etc let me know and I’ll upload somewhere easily accessed

[Metty]

George K wrote:

Thank you for sharing. Very interesting indeed. But just to clarify, does that mean that you missed out on doing the westray-papa westray leg? Was curious if they still hand out certificates to passengers!

Yes, missed out! But as that’s entirely my fault in the planning phase as opposed to some youtubers who booked the correct flight yet still missed out as skipped either Westray or Papay as no pax to pick or drop, I’m not too worried.

[Metty]

Man of Kent wrote:

Thanks for the report @Metty certainly different to the usual trip reports. I do enjoy kippers for breakfast occasionally but very few hotels offer them I find.

Have never been to that part of the world but we watched Our Farming Life on the BBC earlier this year and one of the couples featured farmed on Papa Westray and some of the scenery looked really beautiful.

Yes, truly stunning scenery, as were the other islands we saw while overflying at 1000 feet. Whilst a day trip – to tick off the shortest flight – is possible, we thought staying over would be fun. Which it was, as the blue skies were stunning. Last night, apparently the Aurora Borealis was too.
I had no idea that the island is quite trendy on the back of recent film ‘The Outrun’ which we have yet to watch 🙂