A year ago airberlin announced that they were going to introduce business class on their intra-Europe flights. As anyone who has flown intra-Europe business class knows, it's not a terribly exciting product. It's typically just an economy seat with a blocked middle and improved food and drinks. Airberlin has been struggling financially, and they've ultimately…
Continue reading: Airberlin Is Doubling Their Regional Business Class Seat Count
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Booking a biz ticket but having to do one of the legs in economy always makes me annoyed. Especislly since there is usually no price difference between mixed class and all business class...
Paying 5x the price just to have a "free" sandwich and nobody next to me (other benefits such as priority boarding come with status anyway) is pretty pitiful. Good on AB at least something seems to work for them.
Flew VIE-TXL in AB Business Class. Flight was operated by Alitalia and there was absolutely no difference between Y and J. One of the flight attendants even asked me if I know why the color of the seat cover in the first row is different compared to the others. Even after I told her that the first row is supposed to be business class I still received nothing.
Flying CGN-TXL I discovered that there is no real lounge for J-class passengers (except the "exclusive waiting area aka big joke). I wonder which lounge BA is using.
I think their move to increase J makes sense, since this is primarily offered for connecting long haul pax and limiting it to 4 seats (the A321 went to HG with no C in the last restructuring), is actually restricting J sales on the lang haul. Quite often, the xxx to DUS (or slightly less TXL) segment is sold out, but there is some availablity on the long haul. So far my two cents on strategy.
Now the experience: I so far only travelled one shorthaul J segment on AB, from TXL to ZRH. I truly enjoyed the front row, since seat pitch is terrible on AB. So if they make row 2 J, they probably have to take one row out (as they did on the AB birds going to EW in the restructuring). The catering is basically you can choose any item from the buy on board menu and it's free in J. In my case, it was a late afternoon flight, so I wanted to have a glass of white wine and the tapas. The tapas were available and delivered to my seat. I really liked them, as this is really the adequate catering for this flight, this time of the day. Much better than say the LH/LX shorthaul J catering which pretends to be a full meal but clearly isn't.
However, none of the two white wines was loaded and neither was the champagne/sparkling wine ... so I settled for the one (out of two) red wines available ... The purser was extremely apologetic and I praised him for the great job he's doing under such difficult circumstances!
This would have been their chance. Put 2row a 2seat and get a real business class. The market for that is surely there(even on intra-german short hauls).