TAP Portugal (Luxembourg to Lisbon)

This was my first flight on the Portuguese national carrier, TAP Portugal, flying from Luxembourg to Lisbon. Although I’m then waiting at Lisbon Airport for a flight to Seville, again with TAP Portugal.

The flight was around fifteen minutes late leaving, but the boarding process was efficient.

This is the aircraft that I flew on, the Airbus A320. This photo is from the in-flight magazine, a relatively interesting publication that was conveniently in both English and Portuguese.

I hadn’t realised until just before take-off that TAP provide free food and drinks on their flights, something I’d rather British Airways still did. A crew member handed out the package containing the chicken roll, an apple juice and some aircraft-shaped sweets. I think that there was a cheese version of the roll for vegetarians, although it was the meat version that was automatically handed out. It all tasted fine, and was perfectly adequate for a flight of under three hours.

The drinks service came a few minutes later, and it looked like a wide selection of soft drinks were on offer. I opted for a water, but there were coffees and teas available as well.

A reasonable number of flights at Lisbon Airport appeared to require bus transport, which meant that I had a wait on the tarmac in a bus for a few minutes. My view was of TAP’s maintenance depot.

Overall, I thought that the flight was better than I had expected, especially since I hadn’t realised that food and drink were included. The crew were multi-lingual, friendly and welcoming, whilst the aircraft was clean. Perhaps the biggest negative about the flight was that some of the passengers applauded and shouted excitedly when the captain landed the aircraft, and being British, I fouTAP nd this behaviour far too raucous.