Air China's Forbidden Pavilion First Class flies the 747-8I and select 777-300ER fleet out of Beijing on PEK-JFK, LAX, FRA, CDG, and LHR. We assess the suite, the Maotai program, PhoenixMiles redemption realities, and how it stacks up against Lufthansa Allegris First, Air France La Première, Emirates First, and ANA The Suite.
Seven years after its 2019 debut, ANA's 'The Room' is still the largest business class seat flying — 38 inches wide, with a footwell big enough to lie sideways in, a closing door, and a kaiseki service that quietly outclasses most first class. Here is why the bar has not moved.
Cathay's long-awaited Aria Suite replaces the carrier's decade-old reverse-herringbone with a closing-door, 20-inch wide, 80-plus-inch bed product that finally puts the OneWorld carrier into direct hard-product parity with Qsuite — and on a few spec lines, ahead of it.
Two years into the rollout, JAL's Sky Suite III has settled into a confident middle-of-the-pack position: an Apex Suite platform softened by Japanese hospitality, a closing door that the original cabin lacked, and a hard product that reads quieter than ANA's The Room on paper but lands closer than the dimension sheet suggests once you fly it.
Korean Air's long-awaited Prestige Suites 2.0 has now flown on enough Boeing 787-10 rotations between Seoul and the United States to be assessed against its category peers. We spent six segments in the cabin between February and April, and a great deal of time in the aftermath of the carrier's Asiana Airlines merger trying to understand what it means for the combined fleet.