STN to BRE Ryanair Economy

Airline:  Ryanair

Flight #: FR3634

Route:    STN-BRE

Class:    Economy

Seat:     2F

Date:     Saturday 24^th May 2025

After seemingly working every Bank Holiday weekend in 2024, I was pleased to have ended up only being rostered to work on the Bank Holiday Monday itself for the 2025 Late May Bank Holiday and so I decided to make use of the weekend and head out of the UK for a trip somewhere. Bremen is a destination that I have planned a trip to previously, but for one reason or another didn’t actually make, and so with some cheap Ryanair flights available, it seemed like the time to visit the German city. And so, early on a Bank Holiday Saturday, I was at Harlow Town station waiting for a delayed Stansted Express to the airport.

Arriving at the airport at 0610, I was thankful to have spent £10 on Fast Track Plus as well as being the Saturday of a Bank Holiday weekend, it was also the first day of the school half term holidays and so Stansted was heaving. With Fast Track Plus I impressively made it from the platform to the exit of security in just 14 minutes and was in the departure lounge just a few minutes late, having also been able to avoid duty free. With a bit of time before my gate would be announced, I headed down to the ’secret’ seating area by the entrance to gates 90-93, which was blessedly quite compared to the main departure lounge.

At 0700, exactly an hour before the departure time of my flight, the gate was announced, and I headed off on the longish walk to gate 47. If you’re flying from Stansted and your gate is announced as one of 40-59, make sure you give yourself plenty of time as it is a 5-10 minute walk to the gates from the departure lounge. As I reached the gate, I ended up being 2^nd in the priority queue for boarding and, less than 15 minutes after the gate had been announced, BoardingNotBoarding started into the stairwell. Thankfully our wait on the windowless stairs only lasted a few minutes and we were soon heading outside for a bit more BoardingNotBoarding at the bottom of the aircraft steps.

Just over ten minutes after ‘Boarding’ started, we were finally allowed onboard the aircraft and I was soon settling into my seat, 2F, a front row window seat on the right-hand side of the aircraft. As well as having great leg room whilst not being an emergency exit seat (the bulkhead and galley are where row 1 would be on this side of the aircraft), row 2 also has a decently placed window, allowing for some plane spotting whilst waiting for boarding to finish. The aircraft for the scheduled hour and 20-minute flight across to Germany was EI-GXL, a six-and-a-half-year-old Boeing 737-800 which had been delivered new to Ryanair. The aircraft had been on the ground since around 1930 the previous evening when it had arrived back to Ryanair’s largest base from the Greek island of Santorini.

As boarding came to an end, the captain made their pre-flight announcement giving us, amongst other things, an estimated flight time of an hour and five minutes. The aircraft door closed at 0749 and at 0756 we were pushed back off stand to begin our taxi to the runway. After a short wait for other departing aircraft, we took off from Stansted’s runway 22 at 0808 and climbed pretty much straight into a bank of cloud. For some reason I always think of Europe as being just to the south of the UK and, whilst a large part of it is, a huge amount of it actually requires you to head east or north-east from Stansted, with my flight to Bremen taking a couple of large left turns after departure to head north-east towards the coast.

Crossing the Suffolk coast to the north-east of Ipswich, our flight path took us across the southern North Sea and to the Dutch coast near the North Holland town of Alkmaar. Continuing across The Netherlands including the Markermeer, one of the lakes formed during the Dutch land reclamation. From here, it wasn’t far to the German border and, with Bremen having an east-west runway, our approach was pretty much straight in to land on runway 09 at 1000 local time, just 52 minutes after departing Stansted. We did get to experience on of Ryanair’s famous decelerations as the pilots slammed on the brakes to be able to take an earlier exit from the runway and we arrived on stand just two minutes after landing.

Whilst Bremen isn’t a tiny airport, it is still relatively small and so the arrivals process was nice and speedy. Just a few minutes after landing the stairs were in place and we were alighting onto the tarmac for the short walk across to the terminal. Passport control was also a breeze and with no bag to collect, I was through into arrivals just over ten minutes after we had landed. I popped up to the viewing area for a quick visit to watch my aircraft depart, but when I did leave the airport it was an easy walk across the terminal forecourt to the tram stop. As arrivals processes go, Bremen has got it down to a fine art and with a well time tram, you could make it to the city’s impressive Cathedral within about 30 minutes of landing.

This was a pretty standard Ryanair flight, and I was impressed with how smoothly everything went, especially the arrival at Bremen, but also how the wait during BoardingNotBoarding was fairly minimal. The flight itself was nothing to write home about with the usual offering of food and drink available to purchase, although having had breakfast on the way to the station I didn’t get anything. Once again, safe, cheap and efficient from Ryanair with friendly crew and staff, making for a good start to another adventure.

Lounge              0*

Seat/Facilities     3*

Food                3*

Service             5*

Punctuality         5*

Overall Rating      16/25 (read about my rating system here!)