Greyish sort of day in Auckland for departure, but nice to be saying goodbye to winter. We Uber-ed our way to the airport for a change, that worked pretty well. Arrived a bit early for check-in so that could have been managed better. But we did notice as we stood in the very short Business queue, that MAS is part of One World, our plan was to do all of the long legs on this trip with StarAlliance, so we obviously didn't convey that adequately to the agent. However as long as we can retain our recently garnered Koru Gold Status, we'll be happy.
Killed a bit of time in the Strata lounge, next time we'll try to avoid that.
MAS loaded us for an on-time departure into their very nice Airbus A330-900 aircraft, first time on one of those, and delighted with all aspects of the flight. Food, service, staff all very good. A delicious St Emilion wine with our evening meal and breakfast a delicious sampling of tasty treats.
A few bumpy bits on the 11hour trip to Kuala Lumpur, but managed a few periods of good rest. We had a couple of hours to spend in the Global Lounge. Encouraging when we checked our luggage location with our brand new Apple Air-Tags to find it was about 300 m from us!
Next flight was our first Turkish Airlines sector to Istanbul and then on to Athens. We were loading onto this at about midnight local time (aka as 3 am in NZ). This was my sleep sector, Ann elected to have the meal and then try for a sleep.
Mine I think was the better option, I got about 7 hours of good sleep. Our aircraft this time was again relatively new, an Airbus A350-900. Flight was again terrific for food service and staff very good. A few bumpy patches, and a track that took us up over Afghanistan, across the top of Iran, over Baku and Tiblisi and then across Turkey to Istanbul.
The lounge in Turkey was a bit of a zoo, very very crowded, but we had less than two hours of transit time, so that was fine.
The last leg was just an hour's flight to Athens, we spent nearly that much time on the ground waiting for runway space at a very crowded Istanbul Airport. Huge numbers of Turkish Airlines planes lined up for departure slots. This time we had an older Boeing B777-300. Business class was rows of seven large armchairs across the cabin, with about a metre of free space between the rows. Sevice again impeccable and they managed to serve a lovely breakfast in that very short airtime.
Entry at Athens Airport was a shocker. about an hour and a half of queuing to allow the entry guys to do facial ID pictures, scan fingerprints, and check the passport and other EU entry stuff. We took nano-seconds to process, don't know why. But it was good to be out in the fresh air and sunshine for the Greek part of our adventures.
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