My experience with Vueling surrounding my flight from Rome to Tel-Aviv was, without competition, the worst I've ever had.
Where can I start? well, how about the huge 50+ people line for the check-in, which barely proceeded, while the staff were hanging around their desks joking with each other? well, alright. Carry on. I watched them embarrassing several women by asking them to take off their coats and boots and jewellery and giving them a full-body search. Alright, not the nicest experience, but not that uncommon either.
We were told that our gate is E52, but the screens showed that our gate is E33. As the gate was changed several times during my earlier flight with this company, I didn't think too much of it, made a long trip around the airport, took a shuttle train, and arrived at gate E33... only to be told by the staff, half an hour later, that the correct gate is indeed the previous E52 (the only reason I asked was that the screens stopped showing flight details).
So we made our way back across the airport, took the shuttle train back, and arrived at, guess what, another personal check. Wait, TWO personal checks? this has never happened to me before at airports. But there was no mistake - it was indeed required for our flight. And so, yet again, I was forced to watch the apathetic, robotic staff humiliate several women by asking them to undress and giving them full-body searches, despite all protests. They never even bothered acknowledging that we did it earlier. I'm only glad that I dressed simply for the flight, but others were not so lucky.
And so we finally arrived at the fated gate E52 to discover another huge, 60+ people line. After a long, exhausting wait, we arrive at the entrance to the plane's sleeve and... we're welcomed with a third, no kidding, security check. This time I got the full-body search experience as well, and it wasn't pleasant at all (there are people paying good money for girls to touch them like that. Alas, the checker was a guy.)
The sleeve included another long queue, but what does that even matter at this point?
The flight itself wasn't too terrible, though the plane's unstable movement did induce nausea in me, which eventually gave way to vomiting in the bathroom.
The announcer talked Spanish incessantly through the speakers, despite this being a flight from Italy to Israel where the majority of passengers should normally not be talking Spanish. Their English was incoherent at best - I certainly was not able to understand their safety guidelines, which is bad because at that point I hoped the plane will crash down into the sea. Alas, it didn't.
The staff never bothered to apologize or explain why we needed three f**king personal, full-body checks. Judging by their apathetic behaviour all along the way I don't think they cared at all. I made my desicion never to fly with Vueling (or Iberian - which seems to be connected to them) again. read more