Brief stopover in Madrid while waiting for a connection to Barcelona, my final destination.

As a reminder, the routing of this trip :

And all the articles that refer to it:

#	Type	Review
1	Lounge	Premium Traveller Lounge Orly 1
2	Flight	Paris Orly-Madrid – Iberia – Business Class
3	Flight	Madrid-Barcelona – Iberia – Business Class
4	Hotel	Arts Barcelona
5	Restaurant	Xerta Barcelona 1*
7	Restaurant	Los Caracoles Barcelona
8	Restaurant	Angle Barcelona 2*
9	Flight	Barcelona-Madrid – Iberia – Business Class
10	Flight	Madrid-Paris Orly – Iberia – Business Class

Ground experience

I arrived at one end of the terminal and am leaving from the other. Fortunately, between the two there is a lounge.

Always so pleasant to walk in this terminal.

I will only be there for a short time so no specific article about the lounge, I will do it when I have more time to explore it.

It is composed of different areas, one more restaurant, another more lounge, another more suitable for those who need to work a little.

The buffet is quite complete and offers hot and cold dishes.

There was also a special animation around the specialties of Cantabria…no time for gastronomic tourism today but I’ll try on the way back.

And here is the plate that I will compose for this express stop.

And here I am again to join my boarding gate, the hardest thing being to get out of the duty free zone to walk at a decent speed.

Once I arrived at the gate, I realized that the boarding time displayed there was 10 minutes earlier than the one announced.

The queues form, only one is not materialized, that of the priority passengers. I assume this is the only place where there is no sign and I will be right.

Finally we wait and…we see the crew arriving 10 min after the time posted for boarding. We shall embark only 6 minutes later, almost at the “theoretical” hour.

Boarding

The boarding begins but after some meters we find ourselves stuck in the gateway. A nasty habit lately.

Finally, we are released and can access the cabin.

The business class cabin of the Iberia A320

We find the same cabin as on the flight that brought me from Orly this morning and its sober grey leather seats.

The legroom is still very good.

There will be 4 rows of business class seats on this flight.

We are ready to leave on time.

The flight and the service

After a very long taxiing we finally leave. I wonder if we don’t taxi at least as much in Madrid as in Istanbul.

The crew comes very quickly to ask us what we want to drink and if we want tapas (ham and cheese). I didn’t expect a snack service on such a short flight, remembering my recent experience on TAP where on the Lisbon-Faro the service was limited to a simple glass of water or orange juice but without anything solid.

It’s not much but for such a short flight it’s enough (except on Turkish Airlines which does miracles with hot meals on 40 minutes flights but it’s another world…).

I would add that it was very good, but in Spain, when it comes to cold cuts and cheese, you are never disappointed.

The flight continues without anything special to report…

We start our descent quickly

Landing and arrival in Barcelona

As we go down the Catalan coast is appearing little by little under our eyes.

It is a little bit shaky…

Then the runway appears below us.

We quickly reach the terminal where we disembark just as quickly. Once again we are totally at the end of the terminal and we will have to walk a bit to reach the exit.

The Crew

Professional and friendly, it manages to provide a service on a short time, which is not seen on all European airlines.

Bottom line

Good service, one cannot ask for the moon on this kind of flight and, compared to my past experiences on other airlines on this kind of rather short domestic flight, I was rather pleasantly surprised.