Has anyone flown recently with this airline?

Would you recommend it?

Also, I'm told by travel agents here in Canada that I would have to book it ourselves.

I've tried the website. And it seems pretty quirky. One moment it checks for flights, the next moment it says the system is busy.

I've tried booking but it doesn't seem to like the non-European phone number. And it seems to take issue with the credit card number as well.

Has anyone tried to book Meridiana from outside Europe? Also, do they issue e-tickets or do they have to give you paper tickets? They were available on lastminute.com, but that site says that paper tickets had to be issued and to ship them would be 30 pounds!!!

Thanks for the help.

Our experience on Meridiana last year was a disaster. Our 10:00 a.m. flight from Naples to Palermo was cancelled without notice. We got booked on the 6:00 p.m. flight which did not take off until after 8:30 and sat on the tarmac in Palermo for over an hour. Our luggage took another hour to come through. From our standpoint at 45 minute flight took 14 hours. On the way back from Naples to Paris we arrived late (7:25 a.m. for our 7:45 a.m. flight), and although the plane was still on the ground, Meridiana refused to let us board and could not arrange any other flight. As a consequence we missed our connection in Paris. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Thanks for the input, rbrazill!

My experience has been OK going on fine.

And I'm struggling to understand your problems with the website. It does seem to be busy occasionally. But your phone problem is odd: the site tells you to prefix your national number with the international code for your country (which is 1 in your case, followed by xxx xxx xxxx). I've tried a dummy North America number, and it worked just the same way as any other number. It's just not possible to discriminate against North American numbers (though it IS possible the machine is confused if you're giving it your access code, for example, rather than your country code)

The site also spells out a number of cards it doesn't take. You might want to check whether you're using one of them.

I haven't tried this particular site, but sometimes you have to use 001 instead of just 1 when entering a North American telephone number.

rbrazill's experience with the late check-in would happen the same way with most budget airlines, and many standard carriers ones also. The extremely delayed flight is certainly unfortunate, though.

Thank you for all your responses.

flanneruk, the credit card I entered isn't one of the ones they don't accept, so not quite sure what's going on there.

For those who did manage to book Meridiana and flown on it, did they issue you an electronic ticket or a paper ticket?

Thanks again for all the help.

I remember now that EasyJet did not accept my Mastercard online, but did accept my Visa. I have no idea why this was, but I thought I would mention it in case it's relevant to your case.