Etihad Airways review by Ghassan Abou Rjeily

When a Giant fell from the Sky This is a sad review on one of my earlier favorite airline that carried a meaningful message in UAE. I moved to the beloved UAE in 2006 and ever since, i have been a loyal customer to the local carrier of the UAE, Etihad Airways. The airline was so good that it created years for advancements to other airlines globally to catch up. Customers, including me, used to gladly pay the extra premium to get the luxury flight from airplanes, services, treatments and many more. Like many airlines, Etihad was impacted by the pandemic and incurred huge losses. But when other airlines recovered, they kept diving on a free fall with one failure after the other now to be competing with charter or budget flights that are now even better than them. Let me start my review with the basics: their call center. It is now a team of incompetent members that are full of misleading information and unprofessional behavior. A team that provides wrong information and false commitments - that is, if they would ever attend to your call. I had the bad experience where i upgraded my flight with them once and paid a premium only to find out later on that my ticket has been cancelled without issuing a new one. And the irony was that when i called them, they said that they had no record of the change despite me providing them with the proof of payment. But this was just the beginning, cut calls, non reachable numbers, and the list never ends. Their app is even worse, a live example i am living now as i wait in Muscat airport after 4 times getting my flight rescheduled. Their app shows that the flights latest update is at 23:50 while the screen at the airport is showing 22:25 and when i went to their helpdesk, the ignorant, useless guy over there could not even provide any update. When i asked him which time is the correct one, he simply said : I don’t know. 4hours of delay for a 1hr trip. I mean come on Etihad, is it too hard to send another airplane? What a shame. Now let’s get to the airplanes. They decided to save some money on maintenance and on fuel by removing the screens from the airplanes and they said that they replaced them with the EBox that never works because the inflight internet doesn’t work. And to add the cherry on top, the flights prices doubled along with the seats. The flights are so packed that you can barely fit your legs. You feel like traveling in a tuna can. I am an Etihad gold guest and i am sorry to say that Etihad became now, in my opinion, the worst carrier that should be stripped from the title of being the national carrier of UAE. They certainly do not reflect the image of this great nation.