After recently flying with Air France A350 in their new Business Class, I now had the opportunity to fly Premium Economy in the A350. The new Air France Business Class was brilliant. Question will be, is Air France Premium Economy – or Premium as it now will be called – also a class apart? Please read this review to learn about the positives and negatives of Air France A350-900 Premium Economy!
Premium Economy Cabin
Air France is using 2 different seat configurations for its A350 planes. The A350 I flew last time to Ho Chi Minh City – with the new Business Class – has 14 rows of business class and 4 rows of premium economy. The A350 I’m flying for this trip to San Francisco, has only 9 rows of business class and 3 rows of premium economy. And if you fly business class, you definitely want to check out which configuration you are flying, because the A350 with 9 rows of business class has the older business class cabin which is not as good as the newest one.
Premium economy seats are exactly the same for both configurations though and seats are in a 2-4-2 configuration. These seats are very comfortable and really nice for a day flight. Seats are made by Collins Aerospace, which is the same manufacturer KLM, Delta and United are using for their Premium Economy seats. The seats recline quite a lot. In fact, I didn’t see a seat in Premium Economy before with so much recline. Great news if you have a front row seat. Not so great news if you don’t have a bulkhead seat and you’re confronted with a big reclining seat entering your personal space…
Amenities
Besides a bottle of water, a comfortable blanket, and pillow, an amenity kit is provided. And this amenity kit looks very nice for Premium Economy. Contents are also not bad with socks, eye mask, earplugs, toothbrush and toothpaste. No body lotion or lip balsem is provided. These are kept for business class with Air France. Well, the body lotion, because lip balsem you will only find in First Class with Air France…
Meals and drinks
Before departure the crew came by with a choice of Champaign or water and at that moment you definitely feel that you are flying with a product which is a real step up from regular economy class. At that point in time, I was also looking very much forward to the meal service which was supposedly inspired by a one star Michelin Chef.
Unfortunately, here is were things started to become less impressive. There was a choice of two pastas; a scallop pasta and a veggie pasta. I wasn’t too impressed with either choice but finally decided to take the veggie pasta. Presentation of the dish with food in plastic containers, was a bit disappointing. This looked more like a regular economy class dish. More important, the taste was also not that great. If I had to rate this dish I would have scored it a 3 out of 10.
Surely Air France would redeem themselves with the pre-arrival meal. At least that’s what I thought until the actual pre-arrival meal arrived. This was a paper bag with rubbish. Actually it was exactly the same as you would get in economy class. So Air France doesn’t even bother offering a better pre-arrival meal for Premium Economy! Of course, if the pre-arrival meal in economy class is brilliant, maybe there wouldn’t be a need for that. But unfortunately, it was really bad and I didn’t eat anything from it.
Conclusion
Air France is positioning itself as the Premium Airline within the Air France – KLM group. KLM is forced to move more and more into the budget direction. And certainly Air France is doing an excellent job with their Business Class product. The new Business Class in the A350 is brilliant and more and more improvements are coming such as free wireless and a matras pad.
Of course Air France is also offering a first class product which is outstanding and recently even became better with a completely new cabin.
But the new Air France’s premium economy cabin really falls short and the only reason for that is the very mediocre food offering. The dinner experience was very disappointing and offering a regular economy class ‘meal’ as pre-arrival meal is simply unacceptable. Especially when you are paying triple the price of a regular economy class ticket! Air France budget airline sister KLM, is doing a much better job in Premium Economy! Better food in KLM than in Air France! Who would have thought that?
Please also have a look at my review on YouTube of this trip on my YouTube channel where I compare Air France Premium Economy with KLM Premium Economy;
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