Originally Posted by QRC3288

I think it depends on how you look at it.

Foot well tight. TV sounds good in theory for people who don't fly as often as the most frequent flyers, but it seems impractical, almost too big while you're sitting there and not ideal in bed mode either.

Some stuff is broken but I give benefit of doubt and assume it will be fixed. On both flights my sliding table top/small storage thing was unable to close. And on one flight a suite door didn't close.

It is 100pct an evolution and hardly groundbreaking product. I think CX is making a mistake marketing it so hard as some remarkable "suite" (not really, it's more reverse herringbone with a door), with this cheesy name "Aria", expectations are high. It has just inflated expectations when in fact CX is just doing a nice tech refresh and medium level redesign to bring them up to competitive standards since most competitors have rolled out better products since CX launched Cirrus in 2011. It has been almost 14 years!

But without a doubt, the Aria seat tech is way better than Cirrus J, as to be expected. And I think Aria seats are a big improvement over Cirrus IMO for middle seats D/G which is half the darn seats in J class. Personally I rarely find myself in the middles D/G these days except occasionally to/from Singapore, but it's hard for me to see how I'd rather have Cirrus J D/G over Aria D/G. That's like asking me if I'd rather not have privacy and older tech or have a small private office no matter which seat I choose with Bluetooth connectivity to my airpods and better charging. And I really prefer privacy above most.

Aria D/G seats also works for both couples thx for the larger sliding privacy shield which can be retracted, and for solo travelers obviously as I say above. Whereas old Cirrus D/G were really only ideal for couples , and not so strong for singles if you care about privacy. The A/K in Cirrus are just so much better IMO, and the disparity is less in Aria. So I do think overall Aria is an improvement for CX J class offering, on a net basis. It's not perfect of course but I think overall it is probably better on the whole.

If I may offer some self criticism, despite my own opinion that the name Arua is dumb and CX is marketing it beyond what it really is, I also can't really fault them since if I ran an airline I'd also market the hell out of my new J even if it wasn't as groundbreaking as my marketing team was pretending. They've gotta market their investment in this product is what I tell myself.

I'm basing this not on a huge sample size, I have flown on it twice now (both regional flights).