San Francisco to Philly. Am Airlines has a barely working internet that is the information hub. The screens on the seat backs are gone. So you wind up using your phone but I don’t own headphones or pods.

Philly to Nice, France ( business class) . Upon boarding and sitting for 35 minutes before departure there are no headphones.
The headphones will be delivered soon . So everyone is wandering around the cabin .

American Business compared to other airlines maybe the most minimal.

Agree about some of the AA trans-Atlantic flights. I have no experience with domestic.

I've been monitoring flights to Europe for months, and American is always the cheapest, be it economy, Premium Economy or Business. I'm beginning to understand why.

I don't often fly biz class, but in the last 6 months I've lucked into a few upgrades on AA due to my status. One upgrade was on a flight from DFW to EZE, the other was MIA to LHR. Both flights were lovely. I have flown business class overseas on United and BA so I do have a frame of reference. I've also had some upgrades AA on domestic flights. Those we nice too, about the same as their competitors.

I do realize that different flights can result in different experiences.

They also collect the headsets very early on long haul flights.

Short haul “first” is pretty poor. Lots of dinks but not much else

Ok so we are up to departure but what happened during the flight?

How was the food, IFE, service and seat comfort?

Flew CLT-MUC, LHR-CLT recently in AA business and was pretty unimpressed. Pre-flight service consisted of a 3 oz plastic cup of OJ or sparking wine (any other request was refused). Post-takeoff drinks and meal service consisted of one drink with nuts, 2 small courses of a so-so meal (which was swept away as quickly as possible) and desert. Maybe one shot at a drink refill. The whole service was done in 30-40 minutes. Not at all a leisurely way to pass some time. Definitely seemed more like it was in the back of the plane years ago. About 1.5 hours into the flight, all attendants disappear.

The pods do provide some privacy, but lying flat is limited to those less than 5'10". And for some reason our flight over was so hot that sleep was impossible (requests to cool things off accomplished nothing). On the flight back, all service of any kind was stopped more than 1 hour to landing. Even getting a small bottle of water was impossible as everything had been locked up.

The flights were on time and AA employees were generally friendly, but I certainly would not consider this a premium service or one worth the extra $$$.

Wow! That’s saying a lot.

Thank you.

Sounds like a highly lackluster effort.

Air China was better than that!

Oh, I forgot to add that on the return flight my screen had a big stripe running down the middle and the crew didn't seem to really care. I didn't expect them to fix it but my suggestion that they write it up so it could be fixed sometime was met with a blank stare. The selection of entertainment options was quite good IMO.