I just flew from Lisbon to Zagreb with Croatia Airlines and here is my opinion of Croatia Airlines.
This Fokker 100 has fokking little legspace, was my first thought when I sat down on the Croatia Airlines flight between Lisbon and Zagreb. The flight was operated by Trade Air, who operates many flights for Croatia Airlines these days. As we took off, I learned that there were a couple of empty rows in the back of the plane and they had more legspace and I could have 3 seats to myself instead of being jammed next to another guy, so I went down the back. That gave some more noise though, as the engines on a Fokker 100 are located by the tail of the plane, but 3 seats and more legspace won, so I moved down there and was happier.
Nice inflight service on Croatia Airlines.
As I boarded the plane, I saw that they were giving out a little newspaper like thing called Zagreb Times, so I grabbed one. It’s a little paper that is aimed at visiting tourists to Zagreb, but I found it very informative and better than your average tourist literature. Really a good idea to have this for the passengers in my opinion, as you are often in need of a good restaurant recommendation when you land in a new city. And Zagreb times had some very good suggestions in this regard.
The food was free of charge on economy class where I was and it consisted of a large sandwich and a cake. The sandwich was quite good and considerably better than most sandwiches I have had on planes. Especially the cheese in the sandwich was very good. I was quite happy with the cake too and all in all, I think this was fine for a 3 hour flight. Drinks were also free and that included alcoholic drinks. I had a glass of red wine, which I thought was quite nice. I asked the cabin crew if the wine was croatian and they brought me the bottle and told me a bit about the wine from the Istrian Peninsula that they were serving onboard. Very nice service that I really enjoyed and the ladies serving us onboard were all in all very service minded and smiling.
My overall thoughts about Croatia Airlines.
If I should rate Croatia Airlines on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest at 10 the highest, then I would give them a 7. The cabin crew, the onboard service and the punctuality of the flights is what gives the airlines the biggest plus points and the lack of space in the seats up front pulls things a little down.
But all in all a decent airline that I will be happy to fly again. Especially when they get a new terminal at Zagreb Airport, which is at the moment one of the most drab airports in Europe, but hopefully that will change next year with the new terminal coming.