I posted here an hour ago about booking a codeshare American Airlines/Iberia Airlines flight from Chicago to Madrid and have now read many bad reviews about Iberia on epinions.com. Has anyone flown them recently and if so, How was your experience? I could have chosen any airline because the ticket was free but chose American/Iberia because I could earn frequent flier miles through them. <BR> Happs.

Good luck. One of our worst travel experiences involved Iberia this past March. We'll never use them again. Rude hostile Iberia staff at the Madrid airport refused to honor our tickets, saying the seats were only standby and then refused to stamp them so that we could use the tickets on a Spanair flight to get to Malaga. All this after we'd been diverted through Paris, traveling all night, dead tired, and desperate to get to bed. They refused to assist us with our lost luggage, which had stayed behind in Paris. The diversion and lost luggage certainly weren't their fault, but the absolutely unsympathetic refusal to board us or rubber stamp our tickets so that another airline which had 2 seats could was really awful. You should do a search on Iberia here. There's plenty to read.

We were stranded for nearly a day trying to get from Madrid to Mallorca last year. They had no control over flights and were so disorganized and not helpful. We literally camped out at the departure gates for flights and begged our way onto a flight. Never again will I fly Iberia. But if American is running the plane it should be ok.

I hate Iberia. The planes are all old and ugly and the flight attendants are dreary and miserable (their peasant-y uniforms are even worse). No one is helpful at all and they seem VERY disorganized and not know what is going on. If you have to make a connection, they don't know the gate for the connection until 15 minutes before the flight is scheduled to leave. The only airline that is worse than Iberia is United. Just my OPINION. Happy Holidays.

What I found funniest of this airline is that they didn't really care whether anyone had a seatbelt on at takeoff, whether the seats were in upright positions or if the tray tables were up. I can't imagine that any of those things make too much of a difference in an emergency, but most other airlines at least make you stick to some rules. They also bumped us off our confirmed flight (but they gave us $225, half of what your ticket cost, and a hotel for the night), and were just generally unpleasant. But honestly, sometimes my flights on other airlines have been terrible too. At least our luggage wasn't lost. I think airlines reflect the character of their countries. Spain is kind of happy go lucky, people are sort of brusque, not that organized and that's exactly what Iberia is. I've never seen a German airline skip a safety rule. The food on Austrian airlines was excellent. Air France was sort of snooty, but good food. I think it just ends up being part of the experience.