<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by room service:
I have flown LH in Business Class from FRA to Moscow and MUC to CAI. In both cases they had no business class seats. They are the same seats as coach. The same holds true of SAS from AMS to Stockholm and Austrian from Vienna to Cairo. They will take your money for business class but you get little or nothing for it. That doesn't happen on UA within the US or anywhere else.</font>
No European airline has business class seats, in the way US carriers have First class seats. Period. If you had been on BA, IB, AF, SK, LO, LX, OS, or OA, the experience would have been no different.
There are historical reasons for this (segments in Europe tend to be shorter than in the US, and pricing of business class is often only US$10 more than the full coach fare). European business travellers are buying flexibility with these fares (as well as extra miles
), lounge access (which unlike in the US you don't buy separately - something which, I might add, drives me nuts about domestic US travel!), and priority check-in. The seat and food (for what is rarely more than a 3 hour flight) are secondary.
I'm not saying that European travellers wouldn't love wider, more comfy business class seats, just that we wouldn't pay more for them!