EasyJet & Southend Airport - London

EasyJet is one of the largest budget carriers in Europe. I have flown numerous times with Ryanair during my Europe trip, it is time for me to find out what set EasyJet apart from Ryanair.

EasyJet operates Southend London to Amsterdam, a less than 50 minute flight time. Some people say that Southend is no longer part of London, since it is a 1 hour train journey from central London. In comparison when I flew into Stansted and had to take a bus into central London, it took nearly 2 hours in traffic (I bought the ticket in advance and didn't realise there's train that would only take an hour).

Southend airport is much smaller than Gatwick or Heathrow, probably smaller than Luton or Stansted as well, since those airports operate more flights. Upon arriving into the check in area, there was no one queuing up so the check in took only 2 to 3 minutes. After checking in, I went through the security check, there was a small queue and it took maybe 5 to 10 minutes at most to get through it.

The airport is not large, there were only a few convenient stores, and maybe 2 restaurants to choose from. I went into one of the bar/restaurants and ordered a pizza for dinner while I had more than 2 hours to spare.

At the boarding time, we went through the gate agent and took the passenger walkway to get to the aircraft. This is an Airbus 319, a rather packed aircraft even

though it is considerably further away from central London. The key difference between EasyJet and Ryanair is the seat, which comes with personal storage net and also a slightly more comfortable seat padding. The legroom is not great on EasyJet, but I find that it may be just ever so slightly better than Ryanair. Since EasyJet is a Low Cost Carrier, anything besides a seat and a carry on baggage are going to cost extra.

A group of ladies sitting behind me were probably a little drunk, and they were laughing and making "woo" noises everytime we hit some turbulence, which is free entertainment for me to see people getting nervous about turbulence but some other passengers were really annoyed and I could hear comments after the flight in regards to it. I am not sure whether I would be able to put up with it if it was a longer flight, but since we were only up in the air for less than an hour, I didn't really have that much of an issue.

Conclusion:

I think that Southend airport is a good option to fly out of London, especially there are many strikes and protest disruption going on Heathrow and Gatwick. The travel time to those airports are probably not much different than travelling to Southend, making it a great alternative to save cost (they are usually cheaper to fly in/out of) and save time, less stressful way to travel in and out of the London region.