Originally Posted by apudme
You are right of course, as the Virgin Upper Class Suite is good competition for NCW, and ANZ will have a similar seat (same design) from mid 2005 if I am correct.
It is the likes of AA, CO and United for which BA NCW still kicks ...!
On seating maybe, but CO is generally better on catering/drinks services than BA NCW (don't know about AA and UA - haven't travelled Business Class with them...)
To be honest I am pretty ok with BA NCW seating (although the new VS Suites are definitely - at least for me - better for sleeping... ZZZzzzz). Especially on the upper deck of a 747.
It is the meal and drinks service that let NCW down (the BA staff themselves can, in my general experiece, be outstanding):
- Only OJ or water pre-takeoff...
- Nuts in a bag???
- The starter and dessert tend to be ok, but,
- The main course tends to suffer from that "(over) baked in one bowl" mentality
- Dessert OR cheese - ok, maybe you could ask for both (but I am pretty shy...
)
- Second meal/snack tends to suffer.... often little imagination on the second meal and rarely a "proper"/cooked breakfast...
- Fortunately I have not had the "pleasure" of the sleeper service... (but it sounds rough to me - if I have paid that much for a ticket, I want a full meal on board if I feel like it...)
So, for me, it is the seats, the staff and the lounges (and the ability to MFU) that make BA attractive.
As other airlines improve their product, it gets harder to justify BA NCW to the other half (the "breadwinner", a great fan of Virgin...
). Other half is a food/AVOD kind of guy...
But then again, we only tend to take a couple of proper paid business class trips a year (i.e. non-MFU'd), and even then they tend to be discount business fares. So we are not big/important customers by ANY sense of the imagination....
Boo