Josh Cahill Flies Royal Jordanian Economy: Food Fine, Service Slow

In "Flying the Middle East's Worst Rated Airline!", published on 20 September 2025, Josh Cahill boards Royal Jordanian's Airbus A320 economy class for the short hop from Amman to Larnaca International Airport (LCA), arriving at the flight with a clear question: does the carrier's poor reputation hold up in practice? The answer, as Cahill documents it, is complicated — the food passes muster, but the service does not.

Getting to the Gate: Tunis, GetJet Airlines, and the Road to Amman

The itinerary begins not in Amman but in Tunis: Cahill boards a GetJet Airlines Airbus A320 from Tunis-Carthage International Airport (TUN) to Amman — the first time Cahill's channel has covered the carrier. GetJet Airlines receives no dedicated verdict in the video; it functions as a transit vehicle to reach the main subject. Cahill's previous visit to Tunisia ended in detention by airport police, documented in "I was DETAINED in Tunisia!" nine months earlier, so the country carries some baggage for him before the Royal Jordanian leg even begins.

The Royal Jordanian segment — an Airbus A320 operating in economy class, departing Amman (AMM) for Larnaca — begins around the 17-minute mark. This marks Cahill's third documented coverage of Royal Jordanian, following a mixed 2021 business-class review and a 2019 Boeing 787 business-class flight that he described as "Nothing really Royal."

Onboard: Catering Holds Up, Service Does Not

Cahill's core findings on the Royal Jordanian flight split cleanly along two lines. The food itself draws qualified praise — he describes it as solid — but the delivery pace is the dominant complaint. At the 9:03 mark he notes that the meal took close to two hours to arrive, an extraordinary delay on a short regional flight. The coffee and tea round never reached completion before the aircraft landed, a detail he flags separately at 9:20.

The incomplete coffee and tea service is not a minor footnote. On a flight of this length — Amman to Larnaca is roughly two hours — a catering round that never finishes suggests either severe understaffing or a crew that has deprioritised the cabin. Cahill does not attribute the failure to a single cause, but the pattern is consistent with what he found on the same airline in 2021, when he criticised both service and catering in business class while noting the seat was comfortable.

The hard product — the A320 cabin itself — is not singled out for praise, and Cahill's broader assessment of the airline's physical presentation leads him to a pointed conclusion about what Royal Jordanian needs to do next. At the 19-minute mark, reflecting on the overall product, he says:

That comment arrives not as an offhand remark but as a considered verdict after Cahill has had time to process the full experience. It is a call for structural change — branding, hardware, and presentation — rather than a complaint about a single bad crew day.

Context and What Comes Next for Royal Jordanian

Cahill's verdict lands at a moment when Royal Jordanian's product is under scrutiny from multiple reviewers. Paul Lucas, nine months after this video, published the first review of Royal Jordanian's brand-new Boeing 787-9 — a mixed assessment that praised the seat but again criticised catering and service, suggesting the airline's soft product issues are not confined to the A320 economy cabin. The gap between the two reviews is wide enough that Cahill's A320 experience and Lucas's 787-9 experience represent different products, but the recurring service criticism across both reviewers and multiple cabin classes points to a systemic pattern rather than an isolated incident.

Larnaca is not new territory for Cahill's channel. One week after this video, he published "Cyprus Airways FALSE promise to its Business Class customers!" — a negative review of the airport's business class offering — making LCA a recurring backdrop for airline disappointments in his recent output.

Royal Jordanian is a Oneworld member and operates out of Queen Alia International Airport (AMM). Its economy class on the A320 is a standard short-haul product, and Cahill does not suggest the airline is unsafe or fundamentally broken — the food, after all, was solid. What the video documents is an airline that delivers an acceptable hard product but struggles to execute the service that surrounds it. Whether the rebrand Cahill calls for would address that gap is a question the airline's management, not its reviewers, will have to answer.