Flying Gulf Air's FALCON GOLD Business Class
- Now, I don't know what I expected Bahrain's airport to be like, but I didn't expect it to be like this. This place is incredible. Hi, good morning. How are you? - So boarding time will be at 10 o'clock. - Okay. Okay, so little bit later, okay.
So we're taking Gulf Air today in their Falcon Gold Business class from here in Bahrain, back to London, Heathrow. I've heard some really good things about some Gulf Air's business class so I'm really looking forward to trying them on their long haul route from here, basically on the 787. It's gonna be a good flight. Having me breakfast and we'll get on our way. All right, boarding time. Let's get down to the gate.
Hello, good morning. How are you? - Fine. - Thank you, sir.
Thank you, sir. - Perfect. - Thank you very much. Thank you. - Thank you. - [Noel] Hello.
Good morning. How are you? Good morning. How are you? - Do you mind if I get a photograph? - [Noel] Go for it, yeah. Yeah, go for it. - I discuss you with my wife, and I tell ya, I always look to see what Noel's been because the cabins and all the rest of it. I find it very interesting.
- It's always funny being recognized on flights. Nice to meet you, whoever you were. Now it's time to board and go get on the Dreamliner. Yes! - Second door on the right.
Thank you very much. - [Noel] Hello! Good morning. - Morning. Okay, sir. Will be that seat, window seat. - [Noel] Perfect. Thank you.
- Enjoy. - All right. So, on board. This is pretty decent, isn't it? So this is the Apex suites that Gulf Air uses. The same suite that Korean Air do.
Check out my Korean Air video. I think on the surface of it, Gulf Air seems much nicer to the Korean Air in terms of how they kitted out the Apex suites at least, so, yeah, really looking forward to this. Thank you. So then let's have a little look around this business class Apex suite here on the Gulf Air Dreamliner. And it is, as I mentioned earlier, the Apex suite which means that you get this really handy little walkway in and out of the suite.
So you don't have to climb over the person of the side of you. You've got your own entrance. Very, very cool. I love that design and I've thought about that.
We've got the remote control here and the controls for little slidey divide thing, which goes up and down. Right. Just there. It's pretty cool as well.
So we got a bit of privacy, you know that bit of the suite all seat controls down here on this side. And then this is the front here above the massive TV screen, we've got this little, I think that forms part of the flatbed. Not entirely sure. And then we've got all sorts of storage down here.
Safety card, all the rest of it down next to it. Very nice, very spacious, and really private as well. And the fact that you've got your own little entrance, I just love that design.
So cool. And out the window, of course, we got the view of that 787 Dreamliner engine. That's an epic view, is it not? Can't wait to see that thing in action later on.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Amenity kit time. Give that a little bit.
We'll go through that in a little while once we're in this sky. Thanks very much. Thank you. Our route today then took us along the Gulf to cross Iraq and Eastern Turkey. We then headed over the Black Sea to cross Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany before starting our descent over the North Sea into Heathrow. Flight time today was six hours and 26 minutes, cruising at 36 and 38,000 feet.
So we're overhead, Iraq at the moment, coming up towards Baghdad. And Iraq's a country I've wanted to visit for the absolute longest time. There's so much cool stuff to do there. It looks like an incredibly beautiful place to visit. And I really wanna fly on Iraq Airways as well, but it's unfortunately visiting Iraq means that it will then cause issues for me visiting other parts of the world as well, which is very sad. I just wish that other parts of the world might look at it and go, you know what? What does it matter if someone's popped through Iraq to go somewhere? Because it's just an incredible place to visit, so maybe fingers crossed one day I'll get down there to Baghdad and visit the rest of Iraq and have a look around that beautiful country, but for now, this is the best view I'm gonna get.
All right, shall we have a look at the amenity kit? In Gulf Air, Falcon Gold. Look at that. Right.
Okay. Very fancy picture of Bahrain building and a nice, Gulf Air emboss on the front. Very smart. Let's have a little look inside. What do we have? What do we have? We have earplugs.
We have a foldy brush thing. Cool, Gulf Air socks. Very smart. Very smart indeed. We have mouthwash.
What was this? Signature eau de toilet. Smell of toilet. A water of toilet actually. Does that mean? They say eau de toilet. Does that not mean like, toilet water? Like, doesn't seem right putting toilet water on your face. I mean, maybe they do in some countries, but anyway, a dental kit.
And what else have we got? Rice extract, lip balm. And a Oriental essence hand and face moisturizer to keep one's hands and faces moisturized. I wanna look at this dental kit.
Let's have a look what's in here. It was just a blue toothbrush. Okay. Yeah, not too bad all in all.
Not massively well stocked I have to say, but it's presented nicely anyway. And it's a nice bag. So there we go. So, dinner time. Now for my starter today I've gone for the Arabic mezze.
It's always quite nice. On these flights I like to try and have the mezze where it's an option 'cause it gives me a chance to sort of taste something a little bit local to the Middle East. And it's always quite nice as well. Quite tasty.
I always like, actually, let's just stick you over here. I do like to try the sort of local food when you try flying on these Middle Eastern airways. It's pretty tasty as well usually. So let's see what Gulf Air's Arabic mezze starter is like. 50 pieces of cutlery out. They do the whole big spoon, little spoon thing.
Big fork, little fork. And they both look the same size, but we use. So that's to break the roll.
It's very confusing with all these knives and forks. Anyway, let me try get some of this. We got a vine leaf here.
See what that tastes like. It's very nice actually. Very nice. I was just thinking. Some green stuff.
I dunno what any of this is apart from the vine leaf but it's very nice. Very nice indeed. I love the olive as well. If you enjoy my videos, I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that subscribe button. I release a new video every single week, so hitting subscribe will make sure that you never miss a single one. Also, if you enjoy this channel check out my Pilot Vlogs channel as well showing my private pilot adventures all around the world.
The link's on the screen now. - Dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, Batman! I've always wanted to do that joke. I'd say time for the main course. We've gone for the grilled steak today. Steak on a plane. So I'm looking forward to trying that actually.
Steak on a plane, is one of the things they either do really well or not well at all, so we'll see exactly how it goes. Let's do this. It's okay. It's okay. A little bit overdone, but I suppose there's really that much option to do it on a skillet and give you like a medium rare choice or something.
It's just cooked or not cooked. It's okay. For a plane steak it's pretty good. You know, the thing I love about this job is the sheer variety I get out of doing it. The last few trips I've been on in the last few videos that you've seen, me getting up to this point, were flying on Romania's cheapest, low cost airline and taking a 1970s Soviet train across Moldova and then trekking across Uzbekistan with Uzbekistan Airways, and now I'm sitting here on Gulf Air, one of the world's best business classes, enjoying an absolutely incredible flight from Bahrain to London, Heathrow. And that's the thing, you see? Like, I get that some people just enjoy traveling in luxury like this constantly, and I could certainly get used to it, but if you don't experience some of the other side of aviation once in a while, or most of the time, then it doesn't, it means it's not as special when you do get to ride like this.
Like, if I didn't fly at 90% of my other flights in economy class, then when it does come to the odd occasion when I fly in business class, I just feel I wouldn't appreciate it as much. And boy, do I appreciate being able to sit here after the last few flights and just sit and relax and enjoy this amazing service, and this amazing product on board Gulf Air. - [Male Narrator] It's time for the Noel Philips loo review.
- All right, time for the loo review on the Gulf Air 787 Dreamliner. Oh, smells like someone's been here before me. It's quite nice. Very spacious. What we've got what? We've got 60 second tap. We've got obviously trash, hand cream, hand wash.
It's okay. Ooh! Ooh! Nice mirror. Yeah, it's alright. It's not bad.
Proper enjoying this flight so far. Actually Gulf Air are very good. Their service has been pretty decent too.
I think the seat's the main thing though that I'm enjoying on this flight. It's just incredible. These Apex suites that they've got are really, really nice and done out very nicely indeed compared to the old Korean Air Apex suites which looked like a hospital seat in the blue compared to how they've fitted them out on this one. It's really nice. So, yeah! Thumbs up Gulf Air so far.
About four hours remaining of the flight now over to London, and yeah, looking forward to seeing what the rest of the flight's got to offer. There was something else in the Gulf Air 787 bathroom. I've never seen this on a plane before. Look at the toilet.
It's like a high tech, super advanced toilet. You can set, oh, you can set a jet of water going up your bum. Up front as well. Wow. Soft back.
Wow. Can set the water pressure. I'm not gonna demo that live on the channel. I don't think anybody needs to see that, but wow.
Yeah, interesting. A bidet in the toilet. High tech toilets on the Gulf Air Dreamliner as well. Very cool.
- [Male Narrator] That was the Noel Philips loo review. - So there we go then. The flat bed on the Gulf Air Dreamliner and it's really nice.
My head doesn't touch that end. My feet don't touch that end, which is really cool. It's really long and really wide. And you know, I like it when they're long and wide at the same time. So I'm hopefully gonna get a little bit of rest now.
This would be perfect for a much longer flight to get a good night's sleep. It's really comfy, and there's like a massage function built into the bed as well, which I need to try, but yeah, really nice. So I'm gonna try and get some rest for a bit. We're over Romania at the moment, so I don't forget to watch my Blue Air video filmed going into Romania.
And of course my train out of Bucharest as well that I did. But in the meantime, I'm gonna get a little bit of rest and I'll see you in a couple of minutes. It's about an hour and a half until landing and we're just over Germany. So tuck into my little snacks. That's good. Very nice.
So the inflight entertainment system here on the Gulf Air Dreamliner is pretty decent. I mentioned before, there's a massive screen at the front there and which I've pretty much had on the air show map all the way through the fly. Let's have a quick look at what options we've got if we're a sort of strange person that doesn't enjoy looking at an air show map for seven hours. Let's see what we've got. And you can control it all through here. Look see, you've got Your Trip and everything.
Let's have a look. What we can do, you can put a playlist of movies together if you want. Okay, so you don't really get the options up on the screen. It's all sort of done on here. Okay, movies. And you just sort of choose which one you want.
There's not really a lot on here that's taking my fancy. There's a lot of, oh, 007. Oh, I want to watch that one actually. The new 007 movie.
It's not that new anymore, but the more recent one anyway. I wanted to watch that. Though Rachel would kill on me 'cause I keep telling her I'm gonna watch it with her, and that's it really. Actually, there's actually not that many movies.
There's maybe like half a dozen movies, so that's interesting TV. So got comedy, international shows. Let's see if they've got Young Sheldon or Big Bang Theory which every flights seems to have. Let's have a look.
How I Met Your Mother. Big Bang Theory. There we go. Knew it would.
Yeah, and again, not on massive, 14 TV shows to watch. So yeah, the flight entertainment it's fancy. It might have been nice if they got a few more things watch, but says him, that's been sat watching the air show map for seven hours, but that's all the entertainment I need. Come on. But the other thing that, I mean, I've not actually seen a 787, by the way, that has the tail cameras and the nose cameras on them.
I've always tried it when I see if it's got it on. I've never do flown on one that does. Have you ever flown on an airline, with a Dreamliner, that has it on? I'm sure there must be some. I'm trying to think.
I don't think I've ever flown on one myself that's had one. So yeah, tail cameras. We need them fitted, or maybe, just maybe next time I could ask them if I could suction up a GoPro to the tail and then do it that way. I dunno whether they go for that or not.
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It's also great to let me access my favorite streaming sites on wifi that may block streaming altogether. Through a VPN, your data is completely encrypted so you can sit and watch your favorite TV shows even at 39,000 feet. Surfshark are offering you an 83% discount and three months free when you use my promo code: Noel Phillips at the link on the screen now.
My flight with Gulf Air today then cost me 1200 quid, which works out to 38 pence per mile. I actually felt like this was reasonable value for money considering the quality of Gulf Air's business class offering. It's just a shame that Gulf Air aren't part of any major alliances, otherwise I'd probably end up using them a lot more.
Thank you so much. - Bye bye. - [Noel] Thank you. Have a good day. You too. Thank you very much.
- [Air Hostess] You take care. - [Noel] Thank you. You too. Thank you very much. Bye bye. As always a massive thank you to my patrons for helping to make these videos possible. You can join them at the link on the screen now for access to my WhatsApp group, weekly live Zoom calls with me, and much, much more. So here we are then back in the UK after my little flight with Gulf Air.
And that was okay, wasn't it? A really nice airline then. I can see why they get such a high rating, very nice product on their Falcon Gold cabin. But so let me know what you thought of it down in the comments. Whether you've flown on Gulf Air before and what's your opinion of them, as opposed to the other airlines in the Middle East, the likes of Emirates and Qatar Airways, and the kind of famous ones that everybody thinks about when they think of a Middle East airline.
But anyway, I'm off home to get some rest now. Thank you so much for watching. Take care and I'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.
2022-02-21 20:14
