Condor just revealed its new Airbus A330-900neo cabins, including a competitive-looking business class. Lufthansa executives should be sweating…
Continue reading: Wow: Condor Unveils New A330-900neo Business Class
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
If they keep their current competitive prices, that will for sure be a nice addition to the TATL options. Hopefully service/catering won't be too bad. I had to laugh out loud picturing the Lufthansa execs reading the press release hah!
Interesting. I wonder if Condor might evolve into an airline that could have a place in the oneworld alliance. Like Air Berlin used to. Oneworld would sure need a central European carrier.
1-2-1: the minimum acceptable configuration for business class in wide-body aircraft.
Lovely design in business class. Yes if LH has a "5 star " business class then this is 5.5 stars!
How sad for LH that a small leisure carrier is going to have better cabins!
Nice idea, but Condor currently relies on Lufthansa and Deutsche Bahn to feed their planes.
Lufthansa wanted to stop being their connecting partner, but that court decided that Lufthansa must partner with Condor.
Sooner or later Lufthansa will find a way out and maybe then the Oneworld would make sense, if Condor starts building up a Hub-and-Spoke system. Don’t you think?
About Air Berlin: I didn’t find them to be fully integrated in OW. It always seemed to me that there were left out a little bit. Like Alitalia in Skyteam.
Beautiful! Great product and great finishes! In like 2 months Condor went from a mediocre, niche & barely known airline in Lufthansa's backyard to a branding that stands out and a product that has LH biting the dust.
Ben, about your remark on Lufthansa competition: it actually is not as bad as you suggest.
When you want to fly from a non-hub city, there is plenty of competition. E.g. from Hamburg to Kansas City, you will need to fly a minimum of three segments. So it doesn’t matter if you fly AA or BA or AF etc.
But yes, there are some few direct flights starting in Frankfurt and Munich where Lufthansa is the only carrier flying nonstop. (Admittedly, flights like DEN-FRA are probably also considered to have no competition, because United is in the same joint venture?)
The first row is also with First Class-like seats, as shown in other images.
(And LH is about to loose their 5-star rating - you heard it here first)
Not necessarily. Condor is still a leisure airline. Their passenger base may be more couples that would rather sit side by side.
On the other hand, for an airline focusing more on business travelers, I could the importance of 1-2-1.
Good point. Maybe something like the Austrian/Swiss business class would make sense for a leisure/hybrid airline. There you have the throne seats and the couple seats..
So funny to hear comments that a 2-2-2 biz class seat configuration "makes sense" for a leisure airline when Condor, the textbook definition of a such a carrier, picks the 1-2-1 layout for their J product. The arm chair experts here must know something the execs running Condor do not.
@Regis
Very true. This is one of the key factors I consider when booking a business tkt. I like my solo seat by the window. And I will not fly any so-called premium airline (cough, cough, Lufthansa) which thinks 2-2-2 (or even 2-3-2) is acceptable. Maybe in the 90s and 00s. But not today.
New business seats will be great compared to their current ones. The last time I flew Condor the service in business class was excellent and exceeded all expectations. I'm hopeful the prices remain the same.
But frankly, the chaos I suffered through with the whole Condor bankruptcy a few years back still has me reluctant to fly Condor. I also fear how reliant they are on Lufthansa when Lufthansa clearly wants to cut those ties. Any data points on how the two interact on a joint ticket that goes astray?
Save the stripey headrest covers these look awfully similar to the, very few, pics out in the wild of the updated Thomson Aero seats that they recently spoke about & said they already had a launch customer lined up for.
I’d say Condor deserves a Skytrax 5-star rating, what do y’all think?
🙂 🙂 NO DOUBT!!!!
As of November 12th, without a doubt the BEST Business Class nonstop flight between Seattle and Frankfurt . . . . NO, not on a paid for 5STAR Airline as many would think, it's a competitor that had to fight the most corrupt airline in Germany for years and then offerning the BEST Business Class product on nonstop flights to Frankfurt from Seattle, WA.
Lufthansa . . . you finally get the long deserved COUNT . . . you're DONE! 😉
YES, loving it!
you might be CK . . . .
but reading your lines, i have no idea, when you flew AA the last time?? 🙂
God bless American . . . if you have never seen anything better then (AA) that, of course you would not be able to compare! 😉
US Americans always need a bit longer . . . . . to get used to something NEW!!
Think of new AA livery?
🙂
Gladly, CONDOR did not ask US people about there new livery.
INTERESTING and NEW, C O O L (not really a US thing, correct?)
GOOD idea!!!!
Partner of Alaska is a loooooong time given already with CONDOR.
COOL
This is why Lufthansa made one of the biggest mistakes possible by revealing their business class product 5 years ago. It allows the competition to look at their planned offering and counter it extremely easily. Take British Airways and Air France for example. Who now offer business suites. By the time Lufthansa finally starts their business class rollout BA will almost be done retrofitting their fleet with a superior product. Its a shame because lufthansa genuinely could be a 5 star airline if they'd introduced their new business class when they revealed it.
Just did a search on Condor website for FRA-CPT route, search results show me the new A330-900neo on the return segment on December 18th.
Checked for other dates, seems it is going into service on Dec 13th from FRA to Capetown.