Lufthansa has one of the most varied assortment in terms of cabin products across their planes. Their premium cabin products on the First Class are varied, but that does not matter much in the future given the airline is pulling back on First Class from many planes. That makes it all the more for Lufthansa Business Class to be a good product.
Lufthansa is going to be introducing a new workhorse in their long-haul fleet in 2020, which will be the Boeing 777X (now renamed to 777-9). While LH was going to be the launch customer for this plane, Emirates is now going to get the first delivery of the new Boeing 777X.
Lufthansa 777X
But Lufthansa is working ahead to ensure that their Business Class on the new planes is getting ready to receive the new passengers. They recently revealed pictures of how the new Business Class would look like, and it actually is impressive. Lufthansa has decided that they will not install the First Class on these planes, so essentially the Business Class is the best cabin on the plane.
Lufthansa Business Class 777-9
Coming from that thought process, Lufthansa has been liberal with space, and it looks really impressive in the renderings. The cabin will feature lie-flat seats with direct aisle access, taking away the pain of the current business class even installed in the A350 cabins, where most seats are 2-2-2 and window seats have to hop-over the aisle passengers to come into the aisle.
The cabin is also spacious. Lufthansa, in all earnestness, could have stuffed in more seats, but they are going with an interesting configuration where every alternate row will have a 1-1-1 configuration, allowing for throne seats. And acknowledging that Europe is full of tall people, the seats would be upto 7.3 feet long. Now, I don’t think all seats are going to be that long.
Lufthansa is also going to offer a number of spatial configurations – for instance, a passenger can choose to have an extended-length bed or a seat with twice as desk space. And while they were at it, Lufthansa says they added a special shoulder zone for side sleepers.
Not just that, there will be Qi-standard wireless charging and digital interfaces on each seat, which will allow the passengers to control the seats and IFE with their own phones or tablets.
Lufthansa Business Class 777-9
And while the new business class is still to be rolled out, the airline is already going to work towards better cabin product in 2018 itself. Mattresses will be provided on long intercontinental flights in 2018, and also sleeping sweaters. I would imagine these should have been there all along, and are the same as available in First Class as of the moment. New blankets are also going to be provided to Business Class customers. As per Lufthansa’s Media department, which was in a mood for some rhyme,
They are lined, but still light, and will keep the passengers warm at night.
Lufthansa, of course, thinks their Business Class would be World Best, I think that needs to wait till they fly this plane. Between now and 2020, there will be tonnes of new product launches, and we definitely know Emirates will launch a new Business Class on the 777X.
What do you make of the new Business Class on Lufthansa?
I flew on their A350 Business class. It was very ordinary. I was surprised to see maintenance issues as well. One of the toilet sink was not operational ..they had put up a hand written notice-Out of Order. The cabin crew used muscle power to open the magazine tray..and so on.The seats were not very comfortable too as compared to say Etihad 77W or 787.
Ajay – this is nice. Hope you can forward some of these product upgrades to Jet Airways. Their 777 business class product is so stale now.
@Deepak this will be on new aircraft. On the existing aircraft even LH will continue with the not so good Business Class.