I managed a few days off at work and decided to meet a friend that was working in São Tomé for a 5 days long weekend in the beautiful islands of São Tomé and Principe.

I decided to fly with Air Luxor because it's the only airline that allows a weekend in São Tomé, as it has 2 flights a week (TAP only has one).

Because Air Luxor markets itself as a low cost airline I expected to pay a lower price than in TAP, but, as it turns out, Air Luxor is as much expensive as TAP and sometimes even more. I ended up paying 1.002,00 euros for the return flight.

The departure time in my ticket was 23.55 but when I got to the airport the flight had been changed to 00.25 with a delay of several hours, the new departure time was 03.45h. The delay was because the aircraft that was going to fly this route had a technical problem and was grounded in Dublin.

Finally Air Luxor decided to cancel the flight to Bissau leaving around the same time (with only 20 passangers) and use that aircraft to fly to São Tomé (our flight had 62 passengers), we ended up departing on time - 00.25h.

The check-in was chaotic, the combined number of passengers for both flights (Bissau and São Tomé) was arround 80 people, but there were hundreds of family members around the check-in area.

Almost everyone on the flight had excess baggage, so they tried to hand over to those who didn't have excess weigt the extra bags. Apparently this is a common thing on Air Luxor flights to Africa, and they simple don't care. Obviously safety concerns come into mind, anyone could check-in a suitcase, even those who weren't flying.

We took off on an ETOPS Airbus A320, Air Luxor only sells 70 of the 160 seats so that they can fly nonstop to São Tomé. We were served a terrible past dinner and I fell asleep immediately (all the seats around me were empty).

We landed ahead of schedule - about 30 minutes.

The cabin crew were extremely friendly and all the girls were really beautiful.

I'll try not to fly Air Luxor again, expensive, unorganized and a bad service, except for the crew.