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It is no secret that I am quite taken by Lufthansa’s premium cabins. (Remember that Lufthansa often offers business class return flights to North America for 55,000 Miles & More points in its monthly mileage bargain promotion). There are two frequent criticisms of the airline’s current business class product: it comes in a 2-2-2 configuration (sometimes 2-3-2) and not all seats have direct aisle access.
Lufthansa announced yesterday via Twitter that its new business seat will be introduced when the airline takes delivery of the new B777-9 in 2020. The airline promises more space, direct aisle access for all seats, and bigger IFE screens. This is what the new cabin will look like:
Note that some rows come with a single seat in the middle. These appear to be very, very spacious. All of the seats will convert into fully flat beds.
Lufthansa also confirmed that all existing long-haul aircraft will eventually be retrofitted in order to retain “consistency”.
Bottom Line
This looks like a substantial improvement over the current 2-2-2 layout, and should be excellent news for solo travellers as you will be able to choose a single seat without anyone immediately next to you.
As keen as I am on Lufthansa, I wonder if this design will feel somewhat unimaginative by the time it is rolled put in 2020 and by the time existing aircraft will have been retrofitted? Qatar for example has offered a 1-2-1 configuration for sometime now on its newer planes and the introduction of the QSuite has certainly upped the game…
Call me cynical but I hate it when airlines roll out a supposedly wonderful new product, but then take 5-10 years to update their entire fleet. Playing the lottery of good/bad configuration isn’t much fun.
That said, my experience of Lufthansa J has been mixed, so an update of their J offer is long overdue…
Lufthansa’s current J seat is one of the worst. Thanks to less or zero competition, they are still peddling their zero privacy seats. Wonder how EU market competition authorities approved their purchase of Austrian, Brussels and Swiss airlines. Effectively zero competition from the hubs in these 4 countries.
I posted on HFP about this regarding the exact same story. The German authorities have also allowed LH to swallow up the bulk of Air Berlin’s ops with no questions asked – and if it’s OK with Berlin then it will certainly be OK with Brussels.
For those of us based in CEE we’re stuck with a situation where LH can crush all competition, keep the prices high for mediocre intra-EU flights, choke off new entrants into the German and Central European market and offer a frankly insulting loyalty scheme that is the worst across the board for just about everything. They’re so arrogant that they even refuse status matches or challenges from the highest level on other schemes to the lowest meaningful level on their own (FTL, which is *A Silver, so worth basically nothing). Guess who denies free bags to *A Golds unless they pay around 100% more than HBO fares for baggage-included fares? Lufty of course! And when the LH Death Star swallowed up Brussels Airlines in its tractor beam they soon followed with the same policy.
I’m getting my revenge this year by bailing out of their scheme and joining Aegean. In fact, I’d consider pretty much anything other than LH M&M.
Not sure about Austrian, but weren’t Brussels and Swiss bought out of bankruptcy (like Air Berlin)? You can always trust European governments to wave through anything that saves some jobs, especially if consumers end up paying…
Brussels weren’t totally bankrupt but it’s true to say they were in a parlous state and you could see which way the wind was blowing. The annoying thing is the inevitability that any airline in the region which gets into difficulty is going to be swallowed up by the LH Death Star. The same would have happened to LOT (which was in dire straits just a couple of years ago, and LH was knocking on the door) but the Poles decided they liked having their own airline (in existence since 1929) so they got some kind of technical bridging loan on favourable enough terms that it was basically a bailout that could be sold to the EU as not being a bailout (c.f. Alitalia).
LOT is therefore one of the few airlines in the M&M fold that doesn’t quite follow the dictats of the LH behemoth. They don’t put massive YQ on reward redemptions (in fact it’s close to zero in many cases) and they don’t screw over *A Golds by refusing them a bag on HBO fares. In fact, LO gives 2 free bags to *A.
And Lufthansa (and their minions) offer so few bargains or worthwhile deals, in comparison to what you can get from other airlines, that their official company motto should be: “Never Knowingly Oversold.” (Hint: John Lewis)
And just to continue my intemperate Lufthansa rant for a moment, the news in Poland is that LH is extremely unhappy with LO being able to offer slightly more generous program terms and the CEO has had sharp words from the boys in Cologne about this. I know the former CEO of LOT so I still pick up some juicy tidbits from time to time. It’s characteristic that Lufthansa are enraged by the presence of even a single semi-independent airline in their eminent domain, which dares to offer less punitive terms to its travellers than what LH insists on.
When it comes to the Miles and More scheme, however, LOT is definitely a rule-taker. The scheme is run lock, stock and barrel by LH and LO was allowed in by invitation. If LO ever tried to offer slightly more generous terms (e.g. 30% on Y instead of 25%; or a less ridiculous threshold for SEN/*G – 100K), they would be kicked out of the scheme immediately.