So now that I'm back a few more details and interesting things I noticed.
First up it appears VH-UIK (one of Bonza's own 737s will operate tomorrow mornings) Mackay flight, it's not quite clear when the Flair aircraft will sub in but today it was sitting down beyond the international end. It appears Bonza will use gate 6 (old international end) for most of their flights moving forward. Swissport are doing the ground handling and in both OOL and TSV they had stairs that were clearly marked as for the 737MAX Front or 737MAX Rear.
View outbound were amazing all the way up the QLD coast this morning:
Onboard not much has changed since the initial flight back in January, all items on the menu are more or less the same and the same price except spirits now come in a bag (well at least that's what the photo shows):
Back in January the photo and onboard they were bottles so I'm not sure why the change but that's the only menu change I could see.
Also the flight info tab now has a moving map that worked half the time. On the way up the black plane symbol didn't show half the time and on the way back despite just having left Townsville, the progress bar shows us almost at the Gold Coast. There was no tracking line or any other details other than what you see in the screenshots
By comparison I recently flew a Jetstar A320 which had a wifi system and their moving map gave a lot more info like a line between places and approx time to go.
On the return Townsville airport showed it's full messy state (although no fault of Bonza's). Boarding was from gate 5 (which is upstairs) but then the plane didn't have a bridge so everyone had to go upstairs, scan their boarding pass then walk outside and back down some stairs but it did make for this nice photo:
On the morning flight the menu wasn't activated until after take off whereas this afternoons one you could order as soon as you stepped onboard. This was the same as the inaugural flight and led to things like the "snag in a bag" selling out right after take off.
Now I took one for the team and ordered some food including the snag in a bag. I placed my order via the app and it took 11 minutes to get the cheese bites and a juice. The snag in a bag and waffle required heating so can about 5 minutes after that. I was impressed because the bread was still crunchy but wow was it messy. I had bread crumbs all over my tray table but it couldn't be worse then over the aisle where they had a chocolate freckles type thing that was everywhere.
Oh and one final thing Tim Jordan Bonza CEO and Carly Povey CCO are some of the most down to earth execs I've ever met. In the 2nd photo the person in the black polo coming down the stairs with the cut out cardboard thumb is Tim. When the return flight landed back into the Gold Coast this evening he remained and thanked everyone getting off as well which was nice. Carly is leaving Bonza as CCO (and the aviation industry as a whole) on 7 December and the incoming person will certainly have big shoes to fill.
