Lots more Emirates flights, and many more details, include full seat, Fleet and Lounge details.
1st Jan 2012
Merry new year! I've been on Emirates a lot - again - and yet again, I've not been able to take photos of most of the meals. So, despite a rack of flights in premium classes, all I have to show for it are photos of the interior of the A380. However, I've put those to good use, and added them to the Emirates A380 Seating Plan.
12th Dec 2011
Finally, another airline, and its a biggie this time, even if their international routes are rather scarce. It's US Airways, and while they may be pretty miserable in parts, they do offer a way to get around the United States that isn't United, and many of us like them just for that. I have of course added details of the US Airways clubs at the three hubs of Charlotte, Philadelphia and Phoenix.
25th Nov 2011
Loads more food and drink pictures, plus more images in the seats in all cabins for Qantas and British Airways.
18th Nov 2011
Yet lounges, this time for
Qantas, with that much awaited opus, the
Sydney Business Class lounge, a lounge I've been trying to visit for almost 10 years. Naturally this is linked into the BA and Cathay pages, as they use that lounge too.
Think I've been quiet? Oh no... I've been working on another project. A search engine for Star Alliance redemption flights, so I can work out where to spend the stack of miles I've been racking up. It's designed for mobile browsing, and I've finally got the beta version up and running and on the net. Oddly, launched at the Adelaide Qantas Club. Check out Seatwolf, and please send me bug reports.
24th Sept 2011
With the sad demise of Air South West, I've been forced onto FlyBE more often than I'd like. As a result I've updated the review, and moved the review into the new v3.11 format.
12th Sept 2011
It's been a long time, but I've finally got some more Emirates flights under my belt, and I can finally update the review and move to v3.11.
30th August 2011
Now that the Turkish Airlines review is there, I've slightly tweaked the page appearance. Lots of changes to the CSS, including...
v3.1: Read more added to the index
v3.2: added redirect for old Hash tags on index to correct sub pages
v3.3: Magazine moved to IFE section - it is after all entertainment!
v3.4: IFE & Lounge & Frequent flyer breadcrumbs with added 2 segments because Google often drops the bottom segment
v3.5: Read more about IFE added to fleet page.
v3.6: Standardise hash tags: Lounges: just use the TLA, and for Aircraft: just use 3 letters
v3.7: Major change to the ADD THIS bar below the breadcumbs. Removed the facility to Email yourself the review (it's confusing to some readers), added the plus one button (but why doesn't it work in IE8?!) and a google translate bar.
v3.8: Full redirect to mobile site form all pages
v3.9: Proper non-Java menu now displayed: 18% of my readers have no Java... odd, but I've now got a menu bar that looks normal for those without...
v3.10: Bottom Buttons now contained in once place, the ZZZ Menus (and some page buttons need a BR after them); goodness kwows why I left them so long in the airline sub page. Removed quite a lot that aren't going well, and added counters to FB, Twitter and Googleplusone.
v3.11: Changed the bottom button to a dark blue outline: it seems many people didn't see it was there.
30th August 2011
Turkish Airlines review is now live, after a lot of agonising about them. I'd really like to like the airline, I really would. And their hard product is great. Its such a shame though that it all collapses in a screaming heap when anything goes wrong.
22nd August 2011
Would you believe that the iPhone doesn't know about the CSS Arial Narrow, and it all comes out in Times New Roman?! Mobile PHP CSS tweaked to allow for this oddball...
17th August 2011
Hurrah! The mobile site is now up an operational! After far too long thinking I really should develop a mobile version of the site, I've finally coded up the PHP to come up with not one, but two mobile versions; one for dumb phones, and one for smart (but still small screen) phones. It's a simple bit of PHP to just scrape the site, strip out the guts and spit out raw text for the basic dumb phone version, but slightly more complicated for the 'tablet' version, which has to interpret all my links and images, and resize them according to the screen size of the mobile you are browsing from. The ultra-low graphics index is here, while the moderate graphics version is
here. Of course I've stuck to the conventions with a mobile.airreview.com mobile sub domain, and you can access all the pages directly, for example, here is the
Qantas Fleet page in tablet form.
13th August 2011
Oooops. Found a bug in the seatmaps where I'd accidentally loaded up the wrong index file, and it's sat there for a couple of months at a page noone should get to. Alas, it's even been indexed with a huge pagerank at Google, leading to a bunch of 404 errors. Now fixed; my appologies for this.
12th August 2011
Added more details of seats, after a trip on the upper deck of a 747 belonging to Qantas, plus another 747 on Air New Zealand.
8th August 2011
More updates of miserable lounges which I go to - so you know not to bother with, including the
British Airways Nice Lounge.
1st August 2011
Now added the latest amenity kits pictures and reviews plus some more pictures of the first and business class seats to
Qantas,
Air New Zealand and
Air Canada.
22nd July 2011
Now moved into the new v3.5 format: Lufthansa, and Thai Airways. Including New Menus, added reas more A link to index & Fleet page, added redirect for old Hash tags on index to correct sub pages, Magazines moved to IFE section, and IFE & Lounge breadcrumbs with added 2 segments.
Now onto the Austrian Airlines lounges. It’s sad being there, as each time I’ve been to Vienna before I’ve been heading off to Australia on Lauda Air, which no longer exists, and Austrian has become all Lufthansa in the meantime too. So, that means a vast change to the Austrian Airlines reviews which are now in v3.1, and of course there are all the pictures of the Austrian Airlines lounges, both on the Schengen side with the
Senator lounges and the
Business lounges
And on the
on the International East side Vienna Airport with the
Senator lounges and the
Business lounges.
24th June 2011
Funny, I’ve been a Gold member of the bmi Diamond Club for a decade now, and yet in all this time I haven’t yet made into the Great British Lounge. It is, in a word, great. I’ve moved the bmi reviews over to v3.1, and of course included full details of the London Heathrow Great British Lounge.
I’m working my way through lounges. Initially, I’m just doing the main international ones before heading into doing the daunting task of doing the US domestic ones (which were pretty miserable anyway) plus the amenity kits, seats, food, and then finally doing the seatmaps, and the larger lounge pictures. Bear with me.
7th June 2011
Goodness, it’s been a busy month.
Not content with flying around the world in a mixture of biz, first, and cattle, I’ve got a vast rack of notes to write up from my brief RTW in 14 days taking in SYD-MEL-AKL-SFO-LAS-PHX-MSP-SEA-LAX-SFO-LAS-ERW ¦LGA-YUL-LHR ¦ LGW-NQY-LGW ¦LHR-VIE-IST-HKG-SYD. It got to the stage where I was at Hong Kong, and I just couldn’t be bothered to get on another plane.
Anyhow I’m making inroads into the vast amount of material I’ve gathered, and it should all be online in a few weeks.
Exactly the same change, with the new v3 format, to the Iberia Review Overview, with a completely updated lounge section including a full review of the new Barcelona Lounges
Converted the BA pages into the new v3 format, with sub pages per review. Of course the main British Airways Review Overview pages are still there, but I've broke the huge long 48 page review, into sub pages, and cleaned out a lot of the lounges which are no longer open. I've also proved that my memory is failing me: I spent ages converting the old lounge-sub-picture-gallery into the new format with the prettier buttons and the better drop down menu, only to twig that I've already done this for Air Southwest. Oh well... Plus, I took pictures last year of the T5 Satellite Galleries, and of Arrivals, and never put them on! Duh, as the younger generation might say. Lounge photo galleries of all of LHR are coming, just as soon as I get a moment, but I need to get this lot cleared, because I have another vast long trip coming up in a few weeks, taking in 8 airlines, 14 flights and 27 lounges...
For many years I've held out against having other traveller's comments directly on the site, but maybe, just maybe, I need to bring some in? What do you think? Should I join the rest of the crowd in having user reviews, or is it better the way I do it at the moment, with my own comments? Let me know... and if you want them, I'll get to grips with PHP and SQL, and start coding...
It's taken a while - a long while - I initially travelled on this airline back in 2004 to report on the Boscastle Flooding, and I've become a regular traveller on the airline ever since. Now that the airline has finally decided to axes it's mainline route - to London Gatwick - and replace it with an obscure milkrun route to Aberdeen of all places, I thought it was time to finally put the review online!
You'll notice that the review pages are now somewhat different to how they look on the previous reviews. I've finally decided to split the reviews into separate pages, because of the sheer hassle of having such vastly long review pages. There are now small tabs at the top of the page for the subsections, and there is also a Air Southwest read the review in one webpage if you prefer the old format, which dates back to 1998 when I first published reviews, very much back in the era of web 1.0.
Indeed, there are still a couple of pages I haven't moved into the middle version 2 format - with the drop down menu at the top, and no longer in a frame - so this represents version 3 I guess. It certainly looks a lot neater, and it's a lot more Google friendly, not to say also consistent in the layout. The breadcrumb trail is now recognised by Google, and even the table borders don't disappear in IE8 (yes, in IE8 if the table is relative, and the table full of colour, the border vanishes! Wacky!)
There are a whole host of changes behind the scenes. Web pages are now faster loading, thanks to faster drop down menus. Even the share this buttons work, and PDF Online in them will even give a PDF of all the reviews on one webpage you can download, and print - or just hit the print button!
25th Feb 2011
This is turning into a struggle. I've decided I hate firefox. Well, hate is a bit strong, as it is a lovely browser, but trying to get a consistent appearance when I'd using IE quirks to create rounded corners on tabs, for example, mean's I've nearly torn my hair out.
Of course, it's my own fault. I should have coded up the site properly to start with: except, back in 2000 when I kicked off, I just put up four pages, with four reviews, where the only tags were h1, bold, image, and link. Pure web 1.0. And indeed, if you go back, you'll see how the site has progresses as HTML has turned into the vauge delights that is Java and HTML.
I digress, it works now. Ish.
But then along comes IE 8, and 9! And Chrome! and...
One of the tricks I'm trying is to use a bug in IE 6 and 8 to create nice rounded corners using the border property: of course IE 7 has missing borders top and bottom, so I've been forced to admit defeat there, and just use a block.
Another neat trick is to put and image in a table in an Iframe? Why? Well, if the image goes over the side of the screen, then it won't create a scroll bar. Now, as I'm sticking to pure web 1.0, and having my text that fills the screen never mind what size you have your browser window (an odd look, but I like it) I need a banner that always fills the screen, but which won't generate a horizontal scroll bar.
18th Feb 2011
Finally, working buttons that don't, actually, use buttons. Or a 9 grid table to get the rounded courner. Another 3 days of bashing my head against Firefox, and it mostly works there too. Those lovely folks as Google did much of the heavy lifing in Recreating the button to show how to create nice looking buttons using CSS, but they left it only half working, and the differences between browsers has driven me up the all.
Why do I need this... all will be explained.
14th Feb 2011
That's it. I've turned into a coder.
I've been trying to do something simple: load an external HTML file into the body of my pages, which has the advantage of keeping the new menus I've been designing in one external file. No dice. Would you believe there isn't a single example of how to do this on the net, anywhere? Oh, sure, there are a few examples of how to code this if you want just one raw text file loaded into a Div. but I don't. I want the file to load as if it was in the body of my text. Oh, and to work accross all browsers, and not be server side. And for the external HTML to appear in search engines.
Finally, after many false starts, I started working with Ajax, which offered some solution, at least if I wanted it loaded into a div. And then after plenty more hours banging my head on the Java, I finally came up with a solution for IE. Eventually I got it working for Firefox, but only after plenty more tweaking, because cursed Firefox will stay continually loading, with a permanent load bar, if you have a document.write without a document.close. Plus, it will clear the screen if you do a document.write, after the page has finished loading, I needed to find a way to hold up firefox while .open("GET" was running. Eventally False=synchronous was the answer.
1st Feb 2011
Goodness, it's taken me months to get the Emirates A380 Seating Plan online, if only because the few photos I took were hazy, and my notes on the plane are scribbled on a napkin. It doesn't help that Emirates own seatplans are so vague, I've had to rely mostly on memory and Airbus' own plans for this one. I'll take a breather on the seatplans for a few weeks, despite having excellent photos of all of Cathay's seats in all planes, and also a half set of Thai's (747s and A340s - I've lost most of my Thai 777 seatphotos, but at least I have the notes).
16th Jan 2011
Happy new year! I've been flying again - this time with a very very intense session on Cathay Pacific when I've had the chance to try out all classes (several times!) on several different routes. At last Cathay will be on the review books - once I get through the backlog of Virgin Blue trips, and even Air Southwest, plus lounges at T3, T5, bits of Europe, and even... NQY. Now, what would you like first?
4th Dec 2010
Another day, another lounge. This time it's the business class lounge at Sydney Terminal 3 domestic - and very definately not the Qantas Club. Oh no, this is the one you can't buy or status your way into... you'll need a business class ticket. I've added to the Qantas review, and added lounge picture gallery subsections. Qantas lounges added include
Sydney Terminal 3 Business Class lounge plus
Brisbane Qantas Club and
Cairns Qantas Club.
20th Nov 2010
Hurrah! There is another new airline. Bangkok Airways has taken me quite a while to write, but after half a dozen flights I feel I know enough about the "boutique" airline of Bangkok to put the review online.
31st October 2010
Goodness, it's taken a while. I've now finished another seatmap: this time its the
Singapore Airlines A380 seatingplan which is fully interactive! I took the photos for this in Toulouse when the aircraft was handed over to Singapore Airlines; my thanks go to SQ for letting me take all the pictures. I just can't believe I've had them all hanging around for a year before I coded up the seatmaps. There are some videos I took too: I couldn't get them in quality, as I was only had one shot at running through the plane to take all the photos, alas. Here are some
more and
here.
10th Oct 2010
Updated some of the Qantas
information that was out of date, such as the new QantasClub prices, miles for upgrades and even the miles to retain silver (good to see them come down!)
20th Sept 2010
I've had a general brush up of some of the out of date info, and put in a redirect so if you find airreview via the old 911mb or even the 110mb pages, you will get a redirect to the proper www.airreview.com pages.
10th Sept 2010
Finished - at last! - coding and loading another seatmap: this time its the Qantas A380 seatingplan which is fully interactive: hover over a seat, and it shows you a picture of the seat, with pictures of meals and entertainment! I'm going to have to take a break from seatmaps for a bit however: it's taken months to get this one to work, and I need to work on other things - like a house! - for a while.
26th August 2010
Hurrah! Airreview is TEN years old today! Which has meant... yet another change of IP. But at least the address looks pretty now. OK, ok, going back to 2000 airreview was just a small sub-site of my blog when I wrote the first four pages, and it only gained it's own URL in 2002, with hosting on the excellent beeb.net site, at White City in Shepherd's Bush. Alas, after it died in 2008 I was forced to migrate to the US, and the very slow and unreliable 110mb.com. I'm really fed up of 110mb being down for days while they change a fuse in the server, or give it a kick, or whatever. So... I've now forked out for something that should, hopefully, be a little more reliable. We'll see... Meanwhile, if you bookmark my pages, you'll see that they now work as proper subdirectories. They should now appear in your browser line and are bookmarkable. EG: It's no longer
thai.airreview.com instead its
www.airreview.com/Thai
10th August 2010
Finally finshed loading the lounge picture sub-directories... they are in the Thai and Singapore subsections. Thai lounges include
BKKHKGCNX
Singapore:
HKGBKKSYD
United:
HKG
1st August 2010
Still updating the Lounge pictures, and I've spent a very long time re-writing the code for the lounge-pictures-sub-pages so they look, um... pretty. There's no extra function, but at least pages like Singapore Airlines Hong Kong Silver Kris lounge look marginally better with a less green index.
18th July 2010
I haven't been idle - infact, I've taken random roundabout flights around Asia to tick off some of the places I've been to before, but in a notorious turn of events, lost all the pictures from in 2008 (yes, I've done F from FRA to HKG and BKK - but have I got the photos to back up the reviews? No I haven't. Thank you BKK...) So, there are now updated lounge photos of SYD, BKK, CNX and HKG, among others. After a pretty hectic run around of 6 lounges in BKK, and 4 in HKG, I'm feeling stuffed, but I've updated the Thai and Singapore pages. Plus, I've travelled in all classes and all aircraft types on Thai, but again, in yet another photo-run-disaster, I've lost all the pictures of the 777 and A300 economy cabin, and of F in the ancient 747 they run up to HKG. Grrrr... I'm most gutted about the loss of the 777: I needed those seat pictures for the seatingplans which are a long time in coming, but trust me, when they arrive, will be worth it...
19th June 2010
Took another quick trip over to Perth, and for once the aircraft scheduling gods looked on me kindly. I got the new A330 with AVOD, so I've updated the Qantas pages with this, and finally got around to taking some more photos of the new Perth Qantas Club, and updated the description. I've even added in a separate box with pictures of the Perth Qantas Club.
5th June 2010
Updated Lufthansa with the new A380 & details of entertainment & luggage allowance.
Another update of bmi; that airline is keeping me on my toes, always changing its routes!
30th May 2010
Hurrah, finally got that update of Emirates online: it's been a while for that one too!
24th May 2010
Hello - it's been a while! I've been tidying up the site, and solving a whole host of typos. Now I've finally got most of it there, and it's time to reveal to the new front menu!
21st Feb 2010
Finally finished putting the new menu layout on the all the reviews, except for EK, UA & BD, which need extensive revisions.
10th Feb 2010
I'm trying an experiment with a new type of front end. Have a look at the work in progress (link no longer active).
21st January 2010
Put Virgin Atlantic into the new format too, and updated the text.
17th January 2010
An update of KLM has also brought in extra lounges, and the new menus.
12th January 2010
Much quicker than I've done it before, I've got Air Malta out of the way after several flights in both cabins.
5th January 2010
It's taken me a month to write it, but the LAN pages are now live, and work on 800, 1024 and 1248 width screens. Also, the top drop down menus I've been working on for a good year are finally here: if only I could have 'em in a IFrame... but no, the content for the top bar has to go in each page. Grrrr...
4th January 2010
Finally completed the firefox-if-ication of the news pages. It's been a long time coming, but with 16% of my readers now using firefox, I thought it was time to get rid of the pesky tables bug (content is centre justified in Firefox by default) the font bug (CSS seem to work in a different way) and the whitespace bug (Firefox adds in whitespace if you put a new line in).
