It’s no secret, I love Etihad. I’ve flown them at least 30 times now and each flight has been great. Overall as an airline, they perform well but lately they’ve been making some decisions for the worse, making it harder for many to see how good of an airline they are.

Cost-cutting isn’t rare, it’s actually very real and happens all of the time in the industry. Some can do it well, some cannot. Etihad have taken a slightly more rapid approach opposed to their ME competition but nothing has been ‘massively’ downgraded. Yes lounge access has been opened up to more people, and the reduction of the chauffeur in every country except the UAE but these aren’t reasons to not choose to fly them. I’m sad to say, they’ve made another choice which is quite a pain and it’s in an area they were on top.

Inflight wifi is becoming the norm nowadays, like it or not – you’ll be seeing it on most aircraft in the next few years, heck even our major Australian carriers Qantas and Virgin are getting it.

Etihad offer inflight wifi on most of their fleet. They use T-Mobile and would offer plans that didn’t have a data cap but rather a time limit. This meant you could use as much data as you wanted for the time of your flight.

The carrier used to offer the following plans, 2 hours for $11.95 USD, 4 hours for $17.95 USD and the whole flight for $21.95 USD.

Here are the new plans:

These were the plans on the flight from Melbourne – Abu Dhabi onboard the A380. I haven’t been able to find out if this is fleet wide or just the A380 but it’s not a good improvement.

$20 USD for 180mb is quite ridiculous and won’t be much benefit to many people. If you want to check social media or emails great but for people wanting to get work done – be prepared to pay big money.