How Is Etihad Airways Economy Class?

I realize it’s been a long time since we’ve shared our experiences with the world’s major airline. But I guess so far we either haven’t found anything that really drives us crazy or nothing that blows our minds. Well, things have changed since we recently flew with Etihad Airways to Japan, and in this post I want to tell you a bit about how is Etihad Airways Economy Class on long haul flights. This post is not a sponsored one, but one based on our recent flights flights from Zurich to Tokyo.

Economy Class on Etihad Airways

Although we initially wanted to choose Qatar Airways, just to get a glimpse of Doha, we opted for Etihad Airways because of the price and the significantly shorter travel time compared to Qatar or Emirates. Our trip to Tokyo started with a Zurich – Abu Dhabi flight, and continued with a three-hour layover in Abu Dhabi and a 10-hour flight to Tokyo.

Economy class tickets include:

23kg hold baggage
7kg cabin baggage and a personal item

That made us give a 10/10 for service included in the economy ticket.

Stopover in Abu Dhabi

Etihad Airways is the national airline of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, and any flight from Europe to Asia involves a stopover in this emirate. If you’ve never been to Abu Dhabi, it’s not a bad idea to have a 1-2 day stopover, and if you happen to need a hotel, I recommend the Premier Inn hotel at the airport. If, however, you don’t plan to leave the airport, you’ll have to spend time in a rather boring airport.

The stopover in Abu Dhabi has a big advantage. The airport is quite small and easy to navigate, even on a short layover. T1 and T3 are well connected, and unlike my nightmare, Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, it’s extremely easy to transfer from one gate to the other here.

Economy class passenger – comfort, entertainment and food

Comfort

We flew on a Boeing 787, with a 3-3-3 configuration. Comfort-wise, everything was ok as far as it can be when you sit 10-11 hours in one seat.

We also got a bag of earplugs and a sleep mask, along with antibacterial wet wipes.

Entertainment

The entertainment part is the most disappointing. If you haven’t been to the cinema in the last six months, you’ll have at least six films to watch. On the other hand, in the movies and series category they have the poorest catalogue I’ve seen. For example, they had season 4 of Friends – the first 3 episodes – and season 7 – also the first 5 episodes. They also had 3 episodes of Young Sheldon and a few episodes of Superstore. In the music department they have a lot of Emirati and Indian artists, and in the games department they have Monopoly and Uno, which kept me up for 2-3 hours.

Instead, they have a digital library with many-many magazines. Which is why I’ll give them a 6/10.

In-flight dining

When it comes to in-flight dining, Etihad Airways are at the top. For economy class, Etihad has by far the best dinning service.

It is known that the food on the plane is not sensational and that the taste buds are not at full capacity anyway. In general, airplane food is not to our taste and the classic “chicken or pasta” is omnipresent. However, Etihad Airways pleasantly surprised us with both the taste of the food and the variety. On each flight we had 2 meals (either dinner and lunch or breakfast and lunch), small snacks – the much-loved Lotus biscuits, and drinks of all kinds. Each time we had a choice of three main courses, one of which was vegetarian.

In terms of food, we tried almost everything. I had fish with vegetables and rice ( score 10), beef goulash with mashed potatoes and vegetables (score 10), prawns with rice (score 10), chicken with vegetables (not to my taste). The main courses were accompanied by good salads and all sorts of puddings (black sesame, green tea, chocolate or apricot). And for breakfast we were spoiled with caprese sandwich and apple crumble.

Another thing I liked was that we didn’t get plastic cutlery. We always got normal cutlery, like at home, and a set of wooden chopsticks.