My Best and Worst Long-Haul: Emirates vs Corsair

Two flights stand above everything else in my memory.

One made me want to only ever fly one airline.

The other made me want to never fly again.

Here's how I earned those two extremes, and what I learned from both.

The Best: Emirates, Christmas Eve, on the A380

The Monster, they call it. Now I know why.

Nim and I were flying to England on the 24th of December. Not by design. By work calendar and family logistics. We didn't think much of it when we booked. We booked Emirates because we usually try to for long-haul. We got premium economy. That was already a small treat for us.

We had no idea what Christmas Eve was going to do to that flight.

We boarded and immediately something felt different. The A380 was already famous to us on paper, but nothing prepares you for stepping into it. The space. The width of the aisle. The feeling of walking into a small hotel more than into an airplane. That was already the first shift.

Then dinner arrived.

And it wasn't dinner. It was a festin.

Turkey. Real turkey. Not the airline version of turkey. Champagne. A whole small ritual around the champagne. Chocolates in a Christmas gift box handed to each passenger. Trimmings I honestly did not expect from an airline flight. The kind of meal you'd have on a good Christmas Eve at home. On a plane. At 40 000 feet.

The crew that night was on a mission. Every walk down the aisle was a small performance of care. They wished you Merry Christmas as if they meant it. And by the time we tucked into the meal, I remember looking at Nim and both of us laughing that same laugh you laugh when reality has just outperformed expectation by a wide margin.

We turned to each other and said the sentence out loud, together, still laughing :

"On veut voyager que par Emirates."

That flight is still our benchmark. Every long-haul since gets measured against it. Most fall short. That's not Emirates' fault. That's what happens when one flight sets a bar most flights can't reach.

The verdict: Emirates on Christmas Eve, in premium economy, on the A380, is one of the reasons I still love flying.

The Worst: Corsair, Post-COVID, on the Way to Portugal

Every element that could go wrong, went wrong. In order.

The year was 2022. We were flying to Portugal for a long-awaited trip. The world had just started opening up. Every airline was still recovering. We chose Corsair. It was a fine choice on paper.

The first leg was Mauritius to Réunion. Fine. Everything on schedule.

Then, Réunion.

We were supposed to be there for a short layover before continuing to Paris. Instead, our flight was delayed. Then delayed again. Then delayed some more. By the time it was clear we were not moving anytime soon, five hours had passed.

Réunion's airport is not built for five hundred people to wait in it at once. Especially not at 9pm, when the lights start turning off around you. Shops closed. Cafés closed. Air conditioning apparently on a timer we hadn't been consulted about. The heat became a real presence.

Then the staff. Not rude, but frozen. Just as depleted as we were. Answering questions in short sentences with no eye contact.

Then the meal.

A bread roll that was harder than the plastic tray it sat on. A main dish I still don't want to describe. I put it back after two attempts. Nim did the same. We hadn't eaten in six hours by then.

The worst part wasn't the delay. It was the domino effect. We had planned a smart transit: a hotel in Paris to shower and rest before our onward flight to Portugal that evening. Five hours of delay ate that hotel window down to two hours. We showered, changed, closed our eyes for forty minutes, and were back at Charles de Gaulle.

By the time we boarded that connecting flight to Portugal, I was ready to write off Corsair forever.

The verdict: the worst long-haul experience of my life, and I still remember the exact temperature of the Réunion terminal at 10pm.

The Comeback

Here is where the story could have ended. It didn't.

Some months later, we needed to fly again. Corsair had the best route and the best price. Against my better judgment, I gave them another chance.

Everything was different.

The crew was attentive. The flight was on time. The meal was warm and actually good. The whole flight felt like it had been delivered by a completely different airline.

That flight taught me something.

Post-COVID was one of the hardest periods any airline has ever faced. Crews were burnt out. Systems were stretched. Supplies were unreliable. Every airline in the world had at least one bad six months in there somewhere. Some hid it better than others. Corsair, apparently, didn't. My flight had been one of the bad ones.

The second flight wasn't a fluke. It was the version of Corsair I had been supposed to fly the first time.

The verdict: one bad flight is not a company. It's a moment. And moments pass.

What I Take Away From Both

The lesson that lives on.

Two flights. Same traveller. Complete opposites. Both taught me something.

Emirates taught me that a flight can be a memory, not just transportation. That a meal at 40 000 feet can be its own event. That an airline can make you laugh in the middle of a nine-hour crossing, and that laugh can live in your head for years.

Corsair taught me that a bad flight is rarely the whole airline. That when a company is going through it, you might get the version of them nobody wanted to give you. And that sometimes, the fairest thing is to go back and see who they really are when the day is normal again.

I fly Emirates whenever I can afford it. I don't refuse Corsair when the ticket is right. Both decisions come from the same principle.

Judge airlines the way you judge people. On a pattern, not a single day.

The Real Answer

I've had a lot of flights over the years. Two of them I remember completely.

One was a Christmas Eve on a plane so big I forgot I was flying. The other was a night in a hot Réunion terminal that I hope never repeats.

Both are still, in a strange way, some of my favourite travel stories to tell. Because between the two of them, they hold the whole truth of what long-haul travel is.

Some flights lift you up. Some flights break you a little. And on a long enough runway, you'll have both.

The airline decides the plane.The moment decides the memory.

Bon vol.