What happens when an airline serves you a genuinely outstanding meal but the crew is nowhere to be found? Josh Cahill found out the hard way — or perhaps the entertaining way — on his February 2026 flight with Tarom Airlines, Romania's national carrier. The result was one of the most deliciously contradictory reviews on his channel: a five-out-of-five for catering paired with a two-out-of-five for service, and a cabin situation so unsupervised that economy passengers simply walked up and sat themselves down in business class.

First Time in Romania — and on Tarom

This video marks the first time Josh Cahill has covered both Romania and Tarom Airlines on his channel, making it a genuine debut on both fronts. Cahill arrived at Bucharest Henri Coandă International Airport with fresh eyes and genuine curiosity, noting: "I was curious to see what Bucharest looks like in 2026." The country clearly made an impression, and the airline gave him plenty to talk about — though not always for the right reasons.

The flight in question operated on an ATR turboprop — a regional workhorse that Cahill was covering for the first time on his channel. The ATR 42-600 is a far cry from the wide-body jets Cahill typically reviews, but the compact aircraft set the stage perfectly for the chaos that followed. With a small cabin and a crew that had apparently decided the galley was a more comfortable place to be than the aisle, the stage was set for passengers to take matters into their own hands.

The Catering Triumph and the Service Disaster

Cahill's verdict on Tarom's catering was unambiguous: the meal service earned a rare perfect score of five out of five. For a regional carrier operating turboprops within Romania, that is no small achievement, and Cahill made sure his audience knew it. The food quality genuinely surprised him — a reminder that airline catering can still delight when an airline chooses to invest in it.

The crew is always hiding in the galley.

The service score, however, told a completely different story. Cahill rated it a two out of five, and the reason was stark: the crew on the ATR flight was largely absent from the cabin. According to Cahill's observations, the lack of crew presence created a vacuum that passengers were only too happy to fill — economy class travellers upgraded themselves to business class, simply because no one was around to stop them. It is the kind of scene that sounds like a comedy sketch but apparently played out in real time at 20,000 feet over Romania.

Verdict: A Mixed Bag Worth Watching

Cahill's overall assessment of Tarom Airlines lands firmly in mixed territory — an airline with genuine culinary ambition but a crew culture that appears to treat passenger interaction as optional. The self-upgrade phenomenon is particularly striking given that Cahill has documented similar crew-absence issues at other carriers over the years. His 2021 review of Bulgaria Air — titled "EXPOSING BULGARIA AIR - NO CREW, NO SAFETY, NO EVERYTHING!" — drew comparisons for its similarly absent cabin crew, though Tarom's version of the story comes with the added absurdity of passengers treating business class as a free-for-all upgrade zone.

For context, Cahill has built a long track record of holding airlines accountable for service failures across Eastern Europe and beyond. His recent coverage of Air Montenegro in a video titled "FRAUD! This Airline Systematically SCAMS Passengers with Fake Upgrades!" shows that the Tarom review fits into a broader pattern of Cahill documenting the gap between what airlines promise and what they deliver in the cabin.

Cahill also slipped in a practical travel tip during the video, recommending that viewers consider using a VPN like Surfshark when connecting to public Wi-Fi — useful advice for anyone travelling through airports and hotels in less digitally secure environments.

Ultimately, the Tarom review is a fascinating case study in airline inconsistency. The kitchen clearly cares; the cabin crew, at least on this particular ATR flight, apparently did not. Whether Tarom's ground-level catering excellence can survive the reputational drag of a crew that retreats to the galley and leaves economy passengers to colonise business class is a question the airline's management might want to address — before Josh Cahill's audience of aviation enthusiasts does it for them.