I just did the return trip (outward trip mentioned earlier in the post) EVN-CDG-SXB. These sectors were no where near as good as the ones I did last week. I'm normally travelling up front but my organisation were not funding this trip and I had an economy class ticket. The EVN-CDG sector was a 5 hour 20 minute trip and this was no fun in an economy class.
The CC served breakfast when the plane was at cruise which took about an hour and then they literally disappeared, 2h 30 mins into the trip I rang the call button as I wanted some coffee and nobody came, I did it a second and third time and still nobody came. In the end I went into the rear galley and couldn't find anyone, though they'd left a few cans of coke and beer which I assume were for people to help themselves. As I turned round and left the galley I noticed two cabin attendents asleep on the rear two rows. I also noticed this on the outward flight but didn't think anything of it as the plane was only about 20% full (in fact the crew took it in turns to have a sleep on this leg) so a full complement of staff was not really necessary but on this sector the plane looked to be about 70% full. About an hour before landing the crew re-appeared and, with a smile on their faces, walked down the aisle and turned off all the illuminated call buttons. One CC then incorrectly advised a good number of Armenian and American people who were transiting to the states they needed to fill out landing cards. One of the Armenians asked me to help him with his landing card so I told him he didn't need to complete one, he called the purser who confirmed that none of them needed to complete landing cards because they were just transiting.
On the positive side despite my flight being late, only giving me 35 mins to get from 2f to 2d I made it without problems and so did my bag.
I mention the thing about sleeping cabin crew because RYR were lambasted for the same thing, personally I don't have a problem with this if the flight is empty but I would have thought that on a flight of that duration all crew should be in an alert state in case of an emergency. I wonder if the Captain was aware that some of them were sleeping...
I can handle the odd bad experience so we'll see what happens with AF in the future and I'll continue to use them for the time being.