CX New Business Class

Recently, a few people wrote in to the local English paper to complain about the new pod-like business class seats in Cathay Pacific's new Boeing 777-300ER planes.

The seats were cramped and claustrophobic, they said, and look like coffins. Compared to the old business class seats, the new ones offer much less space to store items like reading materials and laptops. It looks as if Cathay Pacific (CX) is trying to cram more seats into the business class cabin to milk more money from each flight.

While those letters attracted a handful of "Got Business Class to sit you also complain" type of retorts from other readers, after getting a chance to try it last week when I flew back to Singapore for Chinese New Year, I think the complainants have a point.

The Wife and I had gotten our tickets by redeeming some air miles that were soon to expire so we were in a more experimental mood, but had I or my employer paid HK$12-13K (S$2,200-2,300) for my ticket and I got less space than before, I'd be really annoyed.

The view from the CX Business Class lounge, "The Wing", at Hong Kong International Airport.


On board, the new Business Class seats are arranged in a 1-2-1 configuration, in a "herringbone" arrangement. The Wife and I had a pair of seats in the middle but the partition made it difficult for us to talk to each other during the flight.


My seat. The colour scheme looks pretty cheapo to me.


The view when I was seated. During takeoff and landing, you have to put the TV screen back in its position so it was weird to have to view the safety videos on your neighbour's screen ... ... not that most passengers care for the videos anyway. There was also no view out of the window for those passengers sitting in the middle two seats.

The metallic, oval object on the top right corner of the TV screen is a coat hook. Big deal.

On my right - the handset/entertainment controller, seat controls, reading light and in-seat power supply. The power socket looked like it accepts commonly-used plugs like the Type G 3-pin plugs that we use in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Much better than the power sockets in some airline seats that require you to buy a special adaptor.


On my left, the pocket for newspapers and magazines. I had to lift the arm-rest to access it and as you can see you cannot even put a normal-sized paperback book in it.


The handset has a pretty cool display that shows the flight number (very handy for those filling in immigration forms), remaining flight time, and weather at the destination.


There's a keyboard on the reverse side of the handset. For upcoming web browsing and email/sms services ?


The 15-inch TV screen gets in the way during meal service, and the picture quality of my movie was only average.





CX has explained that the seats were re-designed after an extensive survey of passenger requirements, and privacy was at the top of the list. But they have definitely screwed up by sacrificing so much space for privacy. The only nice thing about the new seats is that it turns into a flat bed, but CX business class just does not feel luxurious any more with the cramped space that each passenger has to spend hours cooped up in.

They should seriously consider stopping the rollout of the new seats if they don't want customers defecting to SQ and EK.