Contras: 1. The crew from Abu Dhabi to Belgrade was appalling. As we touched down at Belgrade Tesla airport, and were still taxiing, many passengers stood up, opened up the overhead compartments, took out their carry-on bags (some were pretty big hard top) and left it on the aisle. The overhead compartment doors were left open and once or twice the crew at the back murmured them to sit on their seats and strap themselves. But neither did the crew come up to severely reprimand them nor did the passengers seem to care. IT WAS THE MOST SHOCKING EXPERIENCE in my over 25 years of flying. Terrible service on part of Etihad Crew.
2. We'd just an hour's transit in Abu Dhabi airport and there were numerous passengers still trying to disembark from the Kochi-Abu Dhabi flight, pass through security checks, walk quite a distance to the gate and then get on to the bus to board the aircraft. Strangely there was no Etihad personnel helping us to navigate through this absolute chaos. Many people, young and old, were literally running with their bags. Some of us yelled that we'd a short connection and then one of the ground staff tried to make way for us to navigate through the huge queues waiting for security. This process could've been managed infinitely better. Just imagine if there were elderly passengers or little children?
3. Food was terrible. I'm a vegetarian and usually Asian vegetarian is reasonably good. In this case the rice was poorly cooked (grainy), lacked any variety (anybody who's familiar with Asian food can assure you that there're amazingly tasty and healthy vegetarian dishes that can be prepared - if Etihad needs help they're welcome to contact me). I'm surprised by all this.
Try Emirates and one can see the quality of the food.
4. We'd to collect our boarding passes at Belgrade airport. We've a carte de legitimation (CDL) residence card for Switzerland but it seemed obvious that the ground staff at Belgrade have no clue what a Swiss CDL looks like. My wife who's a South African national cannot obviously enter Switzerland without a visa but the CDL is a legitimate document and that should have been it. Further we'd been checked in from Kochi to Zurich (and our bags had been checked through to ZRH). It's obvious that Belgrade staff are poorly trained and it caused unnecessary waiting time (nearly 30 minutes) and senior staff had to be summoned to clarify.
I'm terribly disappointed with the overall service of Etihad. I'll never fly through Belgrade for sure. It's horrible and the travel desk were not particularly helpful. In fact I'm considering never to fly Etihad again.
