Airline: Vueling
Flight #: VY6307
Route: BIO-LGW
Class: Space Plus
Seat: 4F
Date: Wednesday 26th February 2025
After an enjoyable couple of days exploring the beautiful city of Bilbao, it was time for me to leave the Basque Country and head home. As with my flight out, my flight back to the UK was with low-cost carrier, Vueling, who would take me from northern Spain back to London’s Gatwick airport. If you want to check out the other posts from my Bilbao trip, you can find them here, here and here.
Arriving at the airport on a bus from the city centre around 1155, I lucked out with a new security lane opening as I arrived. This meant that, despite having to follow ‘old-style’ security rules of removing the liquids and laptop from my bag, I was quickly through to departures within five minutes of getting to the airport. With a bit of time on my hands I decided to head to the Nervión VIP Lounge which I was able to access via Loungekey, which I get access to with my bank. The Nervión lounge is not the ‘obvious’ lounge located on the main departures level but is down on the mezzanine floor of departures and so unfortunately doesn’t have particularly good views of the aircraft. It does have a decent choice of food and drink though and was a peaceful and relaxing place to wait until my gate was announced.
Gate D34 ended up being the gate announced for my flight about an hour before departure and, after finishing my drink in the lounge, I headed down to passport control at around 1300. Unfortunately, as with my arrival into Bilbao, there were very limited passport desks open and quite a queue had formed despite their only being my flight that was non-Schengen. Passport control ended up taking me 15-20 minutes to get through and by the time I reached the gate ‘boarding’ had already started onto the buses that would take us to the aircraft. Whilst I don’t generally mind boarding via bus, it does make a bit of a mockery of low cost carriers charging for ‘priority boarding’ as it ends up with those that have paid extra actually boarding the aircraft last.
The aircraft for my flight back to the UK was EC-KLT, a 17-year-old Airbus A320-200 that had originally been delivered to Clickair in 2008 but joined the Vueling fleet a year later following the merger of the two Spanish airlines. Whilst most of the time flying with low-cost carriers the inbound aircraft has barely been on the ground before the outbound boarding starts, on this occasion the aircraft had been parked up for a few hours since its morning arrival from Vueling’s main hub Barcelona. Onboard, the aircraft has Vueling’s standard interior, laid out in an all-economy configuration but with a few rows of ‘Space Plus’ and a single row of ‘Space One’ that offer more leg room.
I was in seat 4F, a ‘Space Plus’ window seat on the right hand side of the aircraft and there certainly is plenty of leg room compared to the usual, with me being able to put my feet flat without feeling like I was losing my knees. With boarding complete at 1345, five minutes before departure, I had once again lucked out with a row to myself, however it is worth nothing that Vueling include the middle seat being blocked as part of either the ‘Space Plus’ or ‘Space One’ products. The doors were closed pretty quickly after boarding was completed and, with the aircraft having been parked on a ‘taxi-out’ remote stand, no pushback was necessary and we began our taxi at 1356.
Just a few minutes later we were rolling down Bilbao’s runway 30 and took off at 1401, taking a small right turn shortly after take-off to get us heading north. Unfortunately, the clear skies over Bilbao and the Spanish coast didn’t remain and as we crossed the Bay of Biscay, a large bank of cloud blocked the view of the Atlantic Ocean below, only breaking slightly as we crossed the French coast. Back onboard, the crew quickly started the onboard service, and having stupidly dehydrated myself that morning, I went for the two drinks and two snacks deal which costs €11.95 so that I could get a water and something a bit tastier.
The flight passed pretty quickly and just over an hour after leaving Bilbao, the seat belts sign came on and one of the pilots made an announcement with our ETA, weather and a load of extra detail about the runway in use and our approach. Not something most people would care about, but for the AvGeek in me, it was great! The cloud bank hadn’t disappeared as we reached UK skies and the decent was a bit bumpy as we made our way down through the weather, eventually coming out the bottom of the clouds just after the undercarriage had been lowered. Not long after, we touched down on Gatwick’s runway 26L at 1428 UK time, just 87 minutes after taking off from Bilbao.
A quick taxi to the gate saw us on the South Terminal’s stand 2 just a few minutes later and when the doors opened at 1437, I decided to ‘give it a go’ and aim for a train that realistically I thought I had no chance of making. Despite a bit of a walk to passport control, I lucked out and there was no queue, and with no checked bag, I was through into arrivals by 1444. Despite horror stories of Gatwick, a bit of speed walking and darting around dawdlers, I miraculously made it from plane to train in just 10 minutes, catching the 1447 Thameslink service that would take me directly home. Gatwick, take a bow!
As with the flight out, I found this flight back to the UK with Vueling to be peaceful, enjoyable and punctual. All the staff I encountered were friendly and helpful and, other than passport control in Bilbao, the process at both ends of the journey was seamless. I’ll be completely honest, I think Vueling has pushed itself to being my current favourite low-cost carrier, and I’m certainly hoping to plan another trip with them soon.
Lounge 0*
Seat/Facilities 3*
Food 3*
Service 5*
Punctuality 5*
Overall Rating 16/25 (read about my rating system here!)
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