Review of Brussels Airlines flight Munich → Brussels in Economy

Intro

After being away from home more than two weeks and spending a solid two weeks in Romania for work, it was finally time for me to return to home. A few days prior to the flight, our operation department who is responsible for booking tickets contacted me whether I had any suggestions as tickets were extremely expensive to Amsterdam with the cheapest one stop (no direct possible) was charging a solid amount of 680 EUR for a one-way ticket via Bucharest. They came up with a suggestion to book me two separate tickets with Wizzair to London Luton or Barcelona and continue with a different ticket from London Luton with EasyJet or Barcelona with Vueling resulting in a trip time over 12 hours as they found 680 EUR way too expensive compared to the 450 EUR w/ luggage for the other two options.

As I was checking myself, I kindly asked them to book me on a flight with Lufthansa via Munich to Brussels as that flight would cost around 20 EUR more than the other suggestions they gave and would cut my travel time tremendously and also included some mileage with Star Alliance…. This raised a few eyebrows in the office as they were so fixated on Amsterdam, while Brussels (not to be confused with Charleroi) is basically just thirty minutes longer to travel from my hometown, so I didn't really mind.

A few minutes later I received my itinerary on my mail and this is as followed;

MUNICH FRANZ JOSEF STRAUSS AIRPORT

After arriving from my previous flight from Timisoara, I had about two hours to spare for my next departure to Brussels. Scanning through the information panels, I found that my flight would depart from Gate G44, which was like a five minute walk. 

As usual with the majority of German airports, their pride of car manufacturing was on full display in their terminal.

Given that priority pass does not have any agreement with any lounge in terminal two, I decided to slowly make my way to grab a coffee at the shop near my gate as all coffee shops in the center area had huge queues and I didn't fancy to stand in line for twenty minutes for a single cup of coffee.

In the past few months I have noticed that with an increase of travellers that waiting lines for certain restaurants / coffee shops are increasing tremendously at multiple airports in Europe. Not sure whether there is enough to accommodate all travellers or the airport simply not doing their best to disperse passengers across all of the terminal instead.

So in the end I found that the coffee shop near my gate that had a select few people waiting in line, which took only a minute or five. Luckily enough I was there on time as by the time I had my cuppa, the line was also tremendously long.

After finishing my cuppa and with about 30 minutes left for boarding to be called, I decided to take a look around by spotting a few birds when I saw this Boeing 787 of All Nippon Airways preparing for it's flight to Tokyo Haneda as NH218.

A few gates further down the line I spotted this Boeing 777-300ER of Air China being towed to stand for it's departure to Beijing in a few hours as CA962.

By now our aircraft was docking at our gate. OO-SSY would do the honours of bringing us to Brussels. This 19 year old (at time of flying) Airbus A319 in Star Alliance Livery was going to bring us over to Brussels in roughly an hour time OO-SSY was newly delivered to Austrian in June 2005 as OE-LDE before being transfered to Brussels Airlines in March 2023.

An announcement was made that the aircraft was overbooked and whether there were passengers willing to give up their seat for a fair compensation (their words) and that they would do their best to provide them with a suitable alternate to reach Brussels.

This announcement peeked my interest knowing that Lufthansa would depart to Amsterdam at 9 AM and was definitely a better option for me, however the friendly chap behind the counter said that they could put me on the Amsterdam flight, but that the 9 AM flight was out of question as it would be a last minute call whether the aircraft was really overbooked… Knowing that they weren't able to provide me on my request, I politely declined the offer.

Boarding was called about five minutes past the scheduled boarding time and once again was kind of free for all with no proper line to follow, however the ground attendants did adhere to the group numbers, so those who were not eligible for boarding yet were told to wait for their turn.

Upon embarking the aircraft, the purser Jonathan, who made his name clear to most of us, was busy preparing the flight to Brussels while also taking the time to greet us.

Originally I was scheduled to be seated on seat 7F, however my seat was changed to seat 5F, which was the same exact seat I had on my previous flight with Lufthansa. The difference between seat 5F on Lufthansa's A320 and seat 5F on Brussels' A319 is that seat 5F on the A319 of Brussels Airlines is not properly alligned to it's seat, though you got the convenience of having a 1 and a half window.

Though it was the exact same ironing board as you can expect on Lufthansa, however the cabin did look a bit more pleasant with the hints of red colour throughout the cabin.

The view of seat 5F in the Airbus A320 Family is somehow one I absolutely like and I also managed my luggage to be loaded onto the aircraft knowing that my luggage was going to arrive to Brussels.

The seating pitch was however very similar to Lufthansa as it was the same seat. As I previous said, the padding of those ironing boards are extremely uncomfortable, however the legroom you get into return is decent to good, though my preferences are still for better padding.

View of the other row from my seat.

The literature which you can find in your seat pocket contains of a disposal bag, a buy on board menu and a safety card. While knowing that Transavia used to offer french fries on board as the first ever airline, I see that Brussels Airlines took this opportunity too and do offer it too now.

The table was spotlessly clean, had two cupholders and was movable in the direction to or away from you and was curved at the end to make a bit more space for those with a belly like me, yet it didn't poke me as of yet.

Load again was completely full in both classes and it seemed that nobody was eventually kicked off the flight.

The aircraft was equipped with individual air vents, a reading light and a call-to-flight attendant button.

Boarding went quite slow and the aircraft was finally being pushed back 24 minutes past our scheduled departure with the captain reporting a total flight time of one hour and ten minutes.

With a taxi of approximately ten minutes or so, we were lining up for our departure from Runway 26R.

While I'm used to receive a complimentary bottle of water and/or chocolate with Lufthansa and/or any of it's partner, Brussels Airlines is the only one in the group that does not offer anything complimentary with the flight attendants just walking by to ask whether someone was wanting to buy anything from the BoB menu, which to me gave the impression that the flight attendants were already expecting not to sell anytthing.

Cruising the German skies.

Given that Brussels Airlines did not really provide a proper service on one of those shorter flights, there was not much to write about as flight attendants were pretty much non-existing after their stroll through the cabin asking people whether they were interested in buying any goods.

Given the short duration of the flight, it didn't take long for the captain to check in with us again to report that we were already descending to Brussels Airport and gave us a weather update, while apologizing for the small delay.

Touchdown on Runway 25L with a delay of approximately five minutes and the decrease of this delay made me hopeful that I would be able to catch the train of 11.11 from Brussels Airport to home which was giving me approximately fourty minutes to do so.

Disembarkation followed soon after and I made my way to baggage claim to pick up my bag.

Brussels Airport does give you an amazing view over the platform between Pier A (Schengen) & B (International).

The hopes of getting the train of 11.11 am were eventually shattered when it took Brussels Airports a solid hour to drop off our luggage (about 20-30 pieces in total as most were connecting) on our belt meaning that I had to wait another hour for my next ride back to the Netherlands.

Thanks for stopping by!