OMAN AIR: Business Class long-haul on two sectors excellent hard and soft product

I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a few months now. Travelling to the United Kingdom and Europe for the first time in three years is exciting enough, but travelling on a new airline doubled the anticipated excitement. I’ll give you a full review of each flight over the next month or so, but in the meantime, here are my first impressions of Oman Air.

In a nutshell

I’ve just flown two sectors on Oman Air in an A330 and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. With some minor reservations, I loved the hard and soft products. If this airline meets its ambitions, it will be a force to be reckoned with.

The APEX Suites in business class are wonderful. The seats are cosy and that is not code for sardine-like. they are private and enveloping without being enclosed. The ability to adjust the seats into a nearly flat cradling position plus the seat bed padding makes perfect the rest of a side sleeper (TIP: request another pillow or swipe one from a spare seat).

I had a solid four hours on one nearly eight-hour sector, and three or so on a seven-hour sector.

The service was outstanding, rivalling that of airlines like Singapore, Qatar, and Thai in the old days. I read elsewhere that the crew needed to be prompted for refills of alcoholic beverages. If anything the opposite was true, with me having to refuse numerous offers of more champagne.

Excellent service and a comfortable hard product with the APEX suite made this one of my best long haul experiences in a while.

2PAXfly Takeout

I’m used to kvetching about the niggly failings of many an airline. It’s nice to experience the best service on your first trip on an unfamiliar (to me) airline. And even better, the pleasure came at about half the cost of most competing airlines including Qantas. Okay, we sacrificed a single stop for two, but with one transfer of 4.5 hours and the other of under two hours, who cares that it took 30 hours instead of 22 to 24?

Thanks, Oman Air. I’m looking forward to our return journey in a few weeks.