I am about to book a trip from Australia to Paris flying with Emirates airline.
I have the option of flying in either an Airbus A340-500 or Boeing 777-300.
As the journey is 22 hours with one stop in Dubai I would appreciate any feedback on which aircraft is more comfortable and passenger friendly.

By looking at seatguru.com it looks like the A340-500 is 2-4-2 seating. Whereas the 777-300 is 3-4-3. I would pick the A340 if you can get the two outer rows. No chance of getting stuck in the middle.

Tom

Exactly. Avoid EK's 777s.

Given a choice, I will always choose Boeing over Airbus, for engineering reasons. If you can pick your seats, you can limit people climbing over you to one by sitting in D or G. If two are flying, DE and FG are optimal.

ABC <b>D</b>EF<b>G</b> HIJ

In 2-4-2 configurations, obviously you choose AB or GH, but CD and EF are okay, too.

AB CDEF GH

B/D/G/J are the aisle seats in the 2-4-2 configuration.

One reason I'd avoid EK's 777 is that, as noted, it's 3-4-3 seating. That's one more seat than any other airlines configuration of 3-3-3, so those seats are narrow.

The A340 is the better option, since 3-4-3 on a 777 is pretty pathetic.

For what it is worth, the 3-4-3 is used by more than just Emirates. Some of the 777s used by Air France and KLM have 3-4-3. I believe it is also used by one or more of the Chinese carriers, but I don't know for certain. BA actually was the first to have this configuration back in the 90's for certain Caribbean routes, but they abandoned it some time back.

China Southern is the airline that travelgourmet is talking about. They used that for their longhaul CAN-LAX as well.

ANA and JAL uses 10-abreast on their 777 for domestic service.

All of KLM's new 777-300ERs are 10-abreast, while the older 777-200ERs are 9-seat. AF's newer 773ERs are 10-abreast, but the 772ERs and their older 773ERs are still 9-abreast. Initially, AF only uses the 10-seat version for Caribbean and Indian Ocean, but now they have another version that flies everywhere.