In anticipation of the Biden administration finally getting around to opening up travel to the United States the UK, Ireland, and the Schengen area (take your time Joe, no hurry), Aer Lingus has announced that it will be restarting two of its transatlantic routes to the US in the coming weeks.
Aer Lingus brings back its Orlando route
Aer Lingus has confirmed that Orlando will be returning to its route map from 27 October and that it will be operating the Dublin – Orlando service 3x/week on the following schedule:
EI121 DUB 12:20 – 17:00 MCO (Tue, Thu & Sat)EI120 MCO 19:05 – 08:00+1 day DUB (Tue, Thu & Sat)
The route is set to be operated by an Aer Lingus A330-300 which offers 30 Business Class seats and 287 Economy Class seats. The Business Class cabin of this aircraft offers a slightly odd seating layout that varies from row to row but, broadly speaking, the best solo seats are the “throne seats” in 3K and 5K while couples may prefer to give up a window seat in favor of giving both passengers direct access to an aisle by selecting the center pair of seats in any row.
As things stand, this route appears in Aer Lingus’ schedule into the summer season (albeit with revised timings) but that could always change between now and April.
Aer Lingus returns to Newark
Aer Lingus currently operates a service between Dublin and New York JFK 12x/week and as of November, the airline will serve Newark as well.
From 14 November the schedules show Aer Lingus offering a 4x/week service between Dublin and Newark and then moving to a daily service from 30 November. In January and February 2022 the route appears to ever to a 4x/week service but daily flights resume in March 2022.
This is what the flight timings look like from 30 November:
EI101 DUB 13:10 – 16:20 EWR (Daily)EI100 EWR 17:50 – 05:15+1 day DUB (Daily)
The route will be operated by Aer Lingus’ new A321LR aircraft which come with lie-flat Business Class seats and 168 Economy Class seats.
As the seat map above shows pretty clearly, the best solo traveler seats are the seats in rows 3 and 5 (this aircraft doesn’t have a row 1) while there’s not much to separate the pairs of seats elsewhere in the cabin.
As things stand, the schedules show Aer Lingus operating between Dubin and Newark into the summer season, and considering how popular this route is, it’s unlikely that anything other than another pandemic would see that change.
Bottom Line
Aer Lingus will be rebooting two of its transatlantic routes in the coming weeks with Dublin – Orlando and Dublin – Newark both coming back into service on 27 October and 14 November respectively. With still no official announcement from the US administration confirming when, exactly, travel between most of Europe and the United States will return to some semblance of normality, there’s a chance that the route re-launch dates and/or the flight frequencies will change, so no one should be making any non-refundable plans based on the information above.
