I've flown with Iberia in the past, and my opinion of this Spanish airline is nearly the same as its always been... Iberia is a budget airline at best. They'll get you to your destination and both the flights I took with them on this day departed and arrived on time or slightly ahead of schedule, but don't expect any frills whatsoever. I recently flew with Iberia from Copenhagen, Denmark to Madrid, Spain, then onto a smaller city in Spain for a work-related project. The flight from Copenhagen to Madrid was about 3 hours and 20 minutes from gate to gate, was on a no-frills A320 with no music in the armrests, movies or video content to pass the time, only their in-flight magazine. Luckily at least the seats reclined and they didn't cut that option out when ordering these planes!
Staff at the airport were all business when I went to get checked in for this flight. Once the agent at the ticket counter gave me my boarding passes and seat assignments for both flights, I smiled and thanked him, and he didn't even respond. Attendants on the plane were slightly more friendly, but on this flight, they wanted all electronic devices and phones shut off as soon as we walked on the plane, even up to 1/2 hour before we actually pushed back.
One thing I noticed during boarding that I hadn't seen in the past with any other airline was the amount of passengers who were coming onto the plane closer to the departure time, and shifting other passengers' items in the overhead bins, moving them and placing them into other storage areas or in some cases removing them completely from the overhead storage in order to put their own items in there. I noticed it happening a lot on both flights with this airline, and in one example, a woman pulled out 2 larger shopping bags from the overhead and handed them to their owner so she could make space for her purse as she evidently didn't wish to put it under the seat in front of her.
Though there were boarding groups printed on my boarding passes for both flights with this airline, they simply called "all groups/all passengers" when they began boarding the A320 from Copenhagen. It wasn't as disorganized as I expected it to be, though the plane was a larger one (3 seats on both sides of the aisle and nearly 40 rows of seats). They did use the boarding group system on my flight from Madrid. read more