emirates.com

Small and bad service

I've taken Emirates at least a dozen times in the past year for long and short flights so I know them pretty well and have used them a lot. At first they were good and then they got worse the more I used them to the point where I really don't like them now. They do what you need ok, but don't go with them if you want a good experience.Some of the food is good but a lot of it isn't and they're very repetitive mostly with the bad food. Also half the time when they get to you there's 2 options in the menu but they always run out of 1 so you don't get a choice. This is extremely bad if you're vegetarian and they run out of that, then you just don't get to eat.The plane is very cramped with not enough storage overhead or space to even sit let alone move around. There isn't much foot/leg room. There isn't even a big enough seat for you to sit in, you have like 1 inch of space on either side when you sit down. You have small trays to eat on and if the person in front of you reclines their chair slightly then it's so difficult to eat it's barely possible because you have so little space. Other airlines have a lot more space than emirates in every area. And even more airlines may not have a lot of space but in comparison to emirates it's a ton more space. The bathroom is also bad. It's a tiny room that isn't cleaned enough so it's often dirty. A lot of them don't have a grab bar on both sides of the side where some people need them. And since the door is an accordion that folds onto itself it completely blocks the grab bar on one side of the door and renders it useless, so you need one on both sides because of this poorly designed door that blocks 1. A few bathrooms had a grab bar on the door itself which was very useful, but not many have this which is annoying because it's such a great idea, it makes no sense not to have it. The aisle chair is really bad. I thought the flight seats don't have enough space but the aisle chair has much less. It's like half the size of you and when they put the arm rests down they have to force it over you because it's so small it's blocked by your body, no matter how skinny you are cause it's smaller than the width of your bones. They wheel you down the aisle and scrape you on every seat on both sides cause the aisle is so small, then they tell you it gets even narrower half way back so you hit every seat hard and are in a lot of pain after just going from the door at the front of the plane to your seat. The TV is really bad and doesn't work a lot. I was on a 15 hour flight once where it stopped working 4 times and was only operational for like 3 hours. Every time it stopped working I would get a flight attendant to reset it which takes them forever to do. It's usually at least 30 minutes for a simple reset and then the last time my TV broke they reset the entire row instead of just my seat to try and fix it but it does working again after a little bit so I just gave up and stopped asking for a reset. I bring things to do on every flight because I know how bad they are and I have to be prepared to not have anything from them for the entire flight. The flight attendants aren't great either. They're nice but they're inattentive and slow. I'll push the call bell and sometimes they come in 15 minutes but most of the time they take like 45 minutes to come. And in that time a bunch of them walk right past me while the call light is on. I have to physically block their path or tap them so they don't just completely ignore me and waking straight past. And on emirates they're not that helpful sometimes. I'll ask them what a meal is and they'll tell me something completely wrong. Once they said there was chicken in a dish and it was vegetarian, which is incredibly important to know if you can't eat meat. Other airline's flight attendants are so much better than this.Sometimes they don't have priority boarding for disabled passengers, which is very important to have. They'll be a lot of people crowding you at the gate and cutting in front of you even if you're very clearly disabled which is pretty rude and inconsiderate. Then you don't have space to get in an aisle chair to get on the plane so because others are in a rush to get on the plane a few seconds faster they actually make it take much longer for everyone because people can't get on the plane. All of this could be avoided, giving everyone a much better experience, if priority boarding was always called. At check in they don't allow you to bring a personal item if you're male at certain airports. Only if you're female, which is very sexist and also your gender is their assumption so it can easily be wrong, especially if you're non binary or trans or are just ambiguous. I even arrived at a specific airport with a backpack, but departing with the same backpack isn't allowed.

Date of experience: Nov 01, 2025