UIA Ukraine International Airlines

Just terrible service, lousy staff, broken bottle of perfume in my suitcase and etc.

What a nice experience to fly UIA. They are absolutely old school, and in many ways that is refreshing. All my flights were ontime or early, the staff was remarkably professional and kind, and the flights were incredibly cheap. Look there is no seat back entertainment or fancy wifi, but for the price it is a very nice journey. Definitely recommend!

Traveling with 2 kids (one of them is a baby actually) was a challenge, that started right at the check-in. We had 2 pieces of luggage, the first one was underweighted and went through just fine, the second one was 2 kg overweight and it was rejected. There is no option to pay for overweighted 2 kg, we’ve been told to get rid of 2 kg from the luggage or we can’t go through. They also couldn’t return the first suitcase which was underweighted in order to move something from one suitcase to another. Our hand luggage was already packed tightly with baby stuff needed aboard, so we couldn’t move anything there. Only one piece of hand luggage is allowed per person. Luckily a lady in the queu offerd us to move some things to her suitcase. People at the chech-in just didn’t care and offered no help whatsoever for us with 2 kids. Oh yea, old planes, no space between seats for your knees.

EDITORS COMMENT: Lovely to hear that another passenger would help you out like that in a tricky situation.

We (a friend and myself) booked a flight from Brussels to Bangkok with UIA (stop in Kiev), because at that moment it was the cheapest. I had travelled to bangkok before, for the same amount of money, so I thought it would be the same quality as before (other airlines emirates, ethihad,..). It was not! Not like before, we didn’t have much seat comfort, no individual screens for movies (which is nice for a trip over 10hours), the staff barely spoke english (especially the information giving before take-off and landing), and the worst food I’ve ever eaten on a plane (although the ukrainians seems to like it, every other foreign passenger left almost a full plate of food to be wasted).
We also had a shorter flight (brussels-kiev) which made sooo much noise, no one could take a nap and some people really looked worried at some times.

I would only recommend UIA when it’s a short flight and you don’t really have to get comfortable. No long flights, because they are hell!

EDITORS COMMENT: Thanks for the informative review, their long haul product does need to be improved we agree.

Exceptional value for money. Going to Bangkok via Kiev I was ticketed or two separate flights but as luggage was transferred for me for the second plane this presented no problems.

I booked with UIA because I was looking for value for this and was delighted with what I got. To me the negative reviews seem most unfair. With a little research on line I knew what to expect and prepared accordingly. It is a shame the star rating system is not weighted for value. I could have possibly been a little generous in the other categories. Compared with other airlines in these categories UIA were not exceptional but neither were they poor. I am an economy traveller after all. Business class pampering is not expected. That leaves them average but as they use older aircraft means that they possibly should have come out a little lower compared with other scheduled flights.

Gatwick is much more convenient for me than Heathrow but that is personal choice. I checked in on line the day before and this was relatively straight forward. We were allocated two adjacent seats on each flight and were given the opportunity to change them had we wished. There was only one baggage check-in desk for econom