After a short walk from the Aer Lingus lounge that I reviewed last week, I was at my gate.

The terminal is not terribly exciting, but there are a small number of shops and places for coffee. Arriving at my gate there was no plane. There was plenty of seating and the Priority Line was laid out clearly enough. There were staff manning the gate.

Still no plane after about twenty minutes beyond departure time, when I receive a text message telling me that the gate has been moved to one further down the concourse. The plane was taxing in to the gate as I arrived.

After passengers buggies were tagged and people with disabilities were loaded, they did call everyone forward. I was in the first row and was fairly quickly placed my bag in the overhead. There is a special bin for row 1 passengers. There was no obvious baggage check as people struggled on with 3 or 4 bags.

The cabin is all one class as you can see in a 3-3 configuration. The aisle is pretty narrow. The seats are leather covered and fairly comfortable.

I was a little disappointed when two other passengers arrived in my row as the seats had been empty at check-in. One spent a lot of the 90 minute flight in and out of her seat.

Fairly quickly everyone was on – it was a Saturday afternoon – and the door was closed only a few minutes late. The crew did a live safety demo.

Shortly after take off they started to arrange the carts for their inflight sales. The only thing ‘free’ on EI is water – you pay for everything else. Coffee, Tea, snacks. Coffee is EUR3 per cup and a wide range of other items, including warm ham and cheese sandwiches were available. As usual on most intra-europe flights there was no seat power, WiFi or entertainment.

We landed at CDG almost back on time and then had a long taxi to Terminal 1 – the older terminal.

A walk from the gates to the central immigration took about 5 minutes, and there was no queue so I was out fairly quickly and on the TGV VAL transit. This serves Terminals 3 and 2 and at T3, you can pick up the hotel shuttle buses.

All round a decent flight, but really a low cost airline offering much lower service than an equivalent British Airways flight.