During the summer season Luxair flies to Sardinia once a week. As we could only stay 5 days we had to look into options on how to get home to Luxembourg. It turned out that the most convenient was to fly to Rome-Fiumicino with Meridiana and then onward to Luxembourg with Luxair. Meridiana is a private Italian airline with headquarters and main base in Olbia, Sardinia. Read on for our Meridiana Review.
We booked the tickets directly on the Meridiana website a week before the flight. Surprisingly the flights were even cheaper than when we checked prices 10 days before. We paid 234€ for the four of us, checked luggage included.
Meridiana lets you check- in online from the moment you book the tickets. We were also able to select seats for the flight, free of charge.
Meridiana Review – Check In at Olbia airport
We arrived 90 minutes before the 16:35 flight, after dropping our rental car at Olbia airport. There were absolutely no lines at the Meridiana check in counter this early June. This might be different during the high season in July/August, so we recommend you to take this into account. As we had a connecting flight in Rome we asked that they check our bag directly to Luxembourg. The lady wasn’t willing to do it initially and we really had to insist. Luckily, after calling her supervisor she was able to send our luggage directly to Luxembourg.
With our boarding passes in hand we swiftly made it through the security control, which again had no lines. Oh, the joys of traveling in low season…
Meridiana on board experience
Boarding started 30 minutes before the departure time. The plane wasn’t full and we were able to take off on time for a 35 minutes flight. The aircraft operating was an MD80. Although it is an old aircraft (26 years), it wasn’t noisy and leg room was decent. Meridiana’s 4 remaining MD80 aircrafts are to be phased out by October 2017 and will be replaced by a Boeing 737 on this route. Once the cruising altitude was reached, the crew passed through the cabin with a selection of hot and cold beverages. The cabin crews weren’t particularly smiling and looked mostly fed up. They didn’t even bother greeting passengers upon boarding.
We landed in Rome on time had still had 3 hours to spare before the next flight.
All in all, flying with Meridiana was a fair experience. The decent one- way fare at 234€ enabled us to visit Sardinia for 5 days, although there is just a weekly direct flight from Luxembourg. Don’t expect great service, just the convenience to fly from A to B on a short flight.