First class is disappearing from most airlines and getting dramatically better at the handful that kept it. Both of those things are happening at once, and this year has produced more genuinely new first class product than any in recent memory.
Lufthansa’s Allegris suite won a Red Dot Product Design award and is spreading across its long-haul network. Air France put its redesigned La Premiere suite into service and has been rolling it out route by route. Meanwhile Etihad still operates the only three-room apartment in commercial aviation.
What follows is what each of these products actually is, where you can fly it, and what it costs. The cash figures are the easy part. The more useful question, which we get to at the end, is when paying cash makes any sense at all.
#1. Lufthansa Allegris: the most-awarded new cabin in the sky
Allegris is Lufthansa’s complete long-haul cabin redesign, and its first class component took a Red Dot Award in the Product Design category this year. The layout offers individual suites plus a larger configuration marketed as the Suite Plus, which combines two spaces into one for passengers travelling together.
The product flies exclusively on the Airbus A350-900, and specifically on ten aircraft based in Munich. That fleet restriction is the single most important thing to understand about booking it, because it means the route map is narrow and Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s larger hub, is not part of it.
Reviewers have been broadly positive while expressing some puzzlement at the double suite concept, which does not have an obvious precedent elsewhere.