Iberia’s air shuttle between Barcelona and Madrid was, until the entry into service of the high speed train, one of the busiest routes in Europe and possibly in the world.

Even today Barcelona-Madrid remains a flagship route for Iberia and the only one to have its own brand. In fact, “Puente Aéreo” (Air Shuttle) has even entered popular culture in Spain and become a concept of common usage, even in non aeronautical settings.

So this was a flight report that had been in my to-do list for quite some time, let’s get to it!

Flight# IB3005

From: Barcelona-El Prat (BCN)

To: Madrid-Barajas (MAD)

Flight time: 1h

Aircraft: Airbus A320-200

The fight was courtesy of Iberia

The pre-flight experience

Online Check-in

The check-in interface was pretty clean and intuitive, but I must say my first attempt through Iberia’s iPhone app was unsuccessful. It may have been an issue with my phone or connection at the time, but the process got stuck at the step when they ask you to acknowledge the self check-in conditions.

So, after a couple of minutes trying I decided to complete the process on my desktop and there it work pretty well and ended up getting my boarding pass in triplicate (email, wallet and direct download).

In retrospect, I think a nice addition to this process would have been to get some information specific to the “Puente Aéreo” service, since, as we shall soon see, has some specific nice features when it comes to the user experience.

Iberia Air Shuttle Lounge at Barcelona airport

A particularity of Iberia’s Air Shuttle is that it has a designated area at Barcelona airport. That is, it always departs from the same gates, located on the westernmost section of Terminal 1.

This is not random, since Iberia has specific physical infrastructure in this section of the airport in order to service the Air Shuttle to Madrid (although IAG has a significant presence at Barcelona-El Prat through Vueling, Level, BA and other brands and Iberia had run flights to multiple destinations under its own brand in the past, Madrid is nowadays the only destination Iberia flies to from BCN. It does so has at least a dozen times a day, though).

The Air Shuttle has its own access from the street as well as dedicated check-in counters, security controls and baggage collection belts, so it is, de facto, like a separate terminal and you don’t need to mix the crowds that flow through the rest of the terminal (although you can still use the airport’s main access when flying the Air Shuttle if you wish so). This is actually a way to offer fast and direct service to the business crowd (and the politicians!) that use this service regularly, often making the return trip on the same day.

Iberia has also a dedicated business lounge to service the Air Shuttle passengers.

I would say it is quite spacious and well equipped in proportion to the volume of passengers it handles.

Despite this being a rather busy business route, volumes here can never be really huge since there are rarely more than two or at most three flights departing close in time and, I guess, a significant portion of the business travellers that use the Air Shuttle come to the airport with little time to spare (one of the selling points of Iberia’s Air Shuttle is precisely that you can show up at the check-in desk as late as 15 minutes before the flight!).

So, overall, a pretty smooth pre-flight experience.

One observation is that, since at the time of taking this flight Spain still requires face masks onboard planes, several passengers were unceremoniously told to go buy one right when we were boarding.

Yes, I know they should have checked that, but wouldn’t hurt if the airline had a few spare simple masks for these cases, since there is still quite a lot of confusion around this matter and elsewhere in Europe the mask mandate was dropped long ago, as it was also in Spain in airport terminals and basically everywhere but inside the plane.

The flight and cabin

The business class cabin on Iberia’s narrow body fleet is made typically of 4-5 rows, with a curtain separating the front area from the main economy class cabin.

The seats are the same as in economy, although the middle seat is kept always empty and the seat pitch, at 31’, is a bit larger than in economy class. The seat reclines, which is also something increasingly rare in narrow body airliners!

They serve food and drink (more on this shortly!) and

There were no USB or recharging ports, though (which is, in any case, something kind of expected in a 21 year-old aircraft)

All seats had a hook that lets you hang your coat or suit (I am not sure if this available in economy class seats too).

The front cabin toilet is also exclusive for business class use.

Inflight connectivity

The aircraft was equipped with inflight connectivity. Messaging apps, such as Whatsapp and the like is provided for free to business class passengers and members of the Iberia Plus frequent flyer programme. Streaming and full browsing access costs €5.99.

Through the onboard wifi portal you can also access Iberia content and services such as the Ronda inflight magazine and the inflight catering menu (the latter not very relevant for business class passengers, since you are always being served).

Food and drink

The flight is really short, I wrote “one hour” in the header of this review, but in reality is more like 50-55 minutes if the weather allows (we arrived to Madrid ahead of time), so there is only so much you can offer when it comes to food. In fact, I had to hurry up to finish my drink because we were pretty much on final approach before I had time to notice!

Mine was a 8am flight, so we were served breakfast, which you can see here in the pic below.

Some comments about the inflight meal: while I, personally, found these Iberian specialities tasty, I am not sure the choice of food was diverse enough to cater to all tastes and sensitivities you may find onboard. If you don’t eat meat, pork or gluten, you really can’t do much with this breakfast (you can request special meals in advance, but I wonder how many people really do it, specially in these short flights) .

Also, the presentation: while this type of packaging has some practical advantages, I think the large amounts of plastic here not only sends the wrong environmental message, but it also makes the overall product look cheap.

Which may actually be an unfair reflection of reality, since Iberia is doing efforts in the sustainability area, for example, with the recent introduction of sustainable aviation fuels, and, on the quality side, actually, the produce distributed onboard was quite tasty. But, there is certainly some room for improvement on this front.

To remark on the plus side is that the service was excellent and attentive throughout the whole journey.

We arrived at Madrid’s large Terminal 4 an disembarked right on the main terminal. Access to the street was also pretty fast.

Our take:

Efficient and smooth. Maybe some room for improvement in food and having USB chargers would make it even better, but none of these points is critical, this being such a short flight.

Flight review: Iberia Air Shuttle Business Class (A320)