Thai Business Class BKK-NRT; ANA Business Class NRT-SEA
 

We flew on aThai Air Airbus 380 from Bangkok to Narita. Seats are very comfortable and the seats are lie-flat. Since the seating was 1-2-1 in Business class, everyone has immediate access to an aisle. Better yet, the center two seats alternated between the two seats being together (for couples traveling together) and being separated by a partition. I found the plane and the seats to be very comfortable. The food was the best I've eaten on a plane in well over a decade. The service was excellent, the flight attendants very gracious.

From Narita to Seattle we were on an ANA Boeing 787. We really disliked the seating. For one thing, all of the seats were isolated from each other, so there was no where we could sit and actually talk with each other. The assumption seems to be that everyone in business class is flying solo (or flying with a co-worker they would like to avoid) so that was annoying. But also, the seats were pretty uncomfortable for both of us. While they are lie-flat, sitting upright or inclined my back hurt no matter how I adjusted the seat. Food was mediocre, at best. Service was ok, but the English language skills of the ANA flight attendants was no where nearly as good as that of the Thai attendants. I had heard such good reports on ANA, we were really looking forward to this flight.

Kathie I am surprised to hear about your experience on all Nippon Airways and on Asiana as well from what you said on the Asia forum. We are supposed to fly both of them in February so let's see how it goes and I hope that our experience is not like yours for life what we had in the past .

The problem with Asiana was that they had switched planes from what is usually on that route.

I hope you will have better flights than we had. As usual, we loved the Thai flights.

I'll look forward to reading about your flights.

I just flew back from Japan on an ANA 77W NRT-SFO in business class. The seats are indeed very isolating. I've flown it before so chose an aisle seat this time just so I could see what was going on. I found the seat comfort OK both as a seat and as a bed. They provide a mattress to go on top in bed mode, but I did not need to use it (however, I have been sleeping on iron-hard Asian beds for the past few weeks).

The cabin temperature was OK (a common problem with Asian carriers is that they set the temperature far too high).

I had the Japanese main meal and Western breakfast and found both mediocre. I cannot comment on the FAs English skills--I speak elementary Japanese, which is all you need for these situations: it's "white or red?", not the finer points of Wittgenstein.

The thing I really objected to was that they started the breakfast service more than 2 hours out from San Francisco. It's a short flight (only a little over 9 hours) and badly timed (it departs at 17:10, about 4 hours too early) so I wanted to sleep as long as possible, but they turned the lights back on about midnight body time.

Overall, I prefer United on this route.

Meant to say "more like". Voice recognition fails again!

Kathie so what was the switch about? I know some OZ flights have the newer fully lie flat seats vs. the angled lie flat seats. Was this it?

Jacketwatch, I don't know why they made the plane switch. And this wasn't merely the lie flat vs. not issue - this was a plane they normally use for intra-Asia flights, so really pretty uncomfortable for a trans-Pacific flight.

someotherguy, I know what you mean about isolating, Cheryl referred to the seats as cells! And I, too, would have preferred United to both the Asiana flight and the ANA flight. I know that United is the airline everyone loves to hate but they were better than either of these two flights! Unfortunately, United discontinued both the SEA-NRT flight and the NRT-BKK flight.

Another oddity with ANA is that they don't provide amenity kits. They do provide slippers, but for the rest you have to go foraging at a shelf near the front where they leave a stash of eyemasks, earplugs etc. Toothbrushes and some other items are kept in the toilets which, in a definite improvement over United, they do clean regularly.

ANA did provide amenity kits on biz class. I can't speak for economy. SOG are you speaking of biz or econ?

Though we have flown them twice English proficiency was not an issue with us nor with a friend of mine who has flown them probably a dozen times. He loves them. We have friends who are flying them next month so I will ask them about that and their overall impression.

I am aware of their seat configuration but for us it was ok. I had no issues with it. I did like the food more so with them than Asiana but I usually have the ethnic selections vs. the western choices so you could say I prefer Japanese to Korean. Hey, when in Rome... Actually for us the food on Thai (biz) was more like what I would expect in coach class. It was reheated stuff served in those foil containers. No China plates.

Well different strokes for different folks I guess. I certainly hope their quality has not gone down as we are scheduled to fly them in Feb.

Cheers, Larry. :).

I was in business class. Nor were there amenity kits the last time I flew them in 2012.

FWIW, in the last 12 months I've flown business class to Papeete on Air Tahiti Nui, to Amsterdam on BA/AA, to Tokyo/Seoul on AA, to Istanbul on Turkish, to Rio on Delta, to Abu Dhabi on Etihad, and to Tokyo on ANA, all on flat beds (except slant-beds on TN LAX-PPT and AA LAX-NRT). IST-SFO is over 14 hours and ICN-DFW and AUH-SFO are over 16 hours.

The best seats are Etihad and AA (the new all-aisle-access ones, the old slant beds are the worst in the air). Turkish are comfortable but do not have aisle access and are not private. ANA are almost too private. BA and Delta are OK but a bit restricting. I'm a 2MM on United but haven't used them much recently; their seats are comfortable (well, the legacy UA ones are, the legacy CO ones have no space for your feet) but lack aisle-access.

The best food and presentation (candlelight), by far, is Turkish, but the meals take several hours. Etihad is very good also, and on demand. ANA and TN are OK, and BA, Delta and AA are OK to poor.

Service is good on the foreign airlines and highly variable on BA and the domestic ones.

We had the kits last time. It was 2013.

Thanks for the summary of your biz experiences. Its good to know.

I thought AC had ok biz seats, good food and service and as we were delayed by weather and had to spend an overnight in Toronto their over night kits were great, full of goodies.

I too agree that service on foreign carriers exceeds ours in the US.

We received amenity kits on ANA.

We had excellent food - served on china - on Thai.

It's clear from the comments that the airline matters, but so does the plane type and probably the specific flight.

Kathie what plane were you supposed to have and what did they actually use?

We were supposed to be on a 777, but were on an A330 instead. See my report on the flight and the comment from Don Topaz.

That would upset me as well. Being able to lay flat even if it is angled is important to me for such a long flight.