Welcome to the 13th edition of The Up Front Update!
The big thing to note this week: Swiss invents the curtain, sells it as “First Grand Suite”
My email inbox is no stranger to overblown marketing, but Swiss has set a new standard this week with the “First Grand Suite” on its forthcoming Swiss Senses cabins, the red-coloured version of the FICE (Future InterContinental Experience) seats that Lufthansa introduced as Allegris (and which this week have seen criticism in Germany’s aeroTELEGRAPH from Lufthansa’s own flight attendants).
Swiss’ promises that the First Grand Suite “is setting new benchmarks in First Class air travel”, “is further expanding its First Class offering”, and is “private as never before” fall flat when one realises that the First Grand Suite means simply purchasing the left window suite and the centre double suite as a combined package. The Grand Suite is blocked off from the rest of the plane by… just the normal curtain between the seats and the business cabin behind or the galley in front.
It’s unclear what the value proposition is for this product, and I’m not sure even Swiss knows, given the line in its press release suggesting that “the combined private area, which also features over 1.8-meter-high walls, can be used for any of various functions.”
The First Grand Suite “will be bookable solely via the exclusive Swiss First hotline”, once again highlighting the commercialisation and merchandising problems that the FICE generation of seats (with their nearly dozen different types of business class seats alone) exemplifies.
The idea, Swiss’ images and marketing materials suggest, seems to be that a passenger or passengers can use one suite for working and dining (presumably the window) and another for relaxing and sleeping (presumably the centre single). But all these products convert from seat mode to dining mode to bed mode anyway, one hopes in a way that their designers consider them to be at least fairly good for work, rest and play.
Questions abound. Why would passengers in the First Grand Suite use the smaller space in the window suite for, say, dining, rather than the much larger space in the centre double suite? Who, precisely, is clamouring for “a private aisle that’s yours alone”, when the suite doors are 1.8m high? And couldn’t passengers essentially create the First Grand Suite by simply reserving the window and centre suites themselves?
It would be one thing if the walls and doors of the suite product had been designed to somehow convert into a larger or wider space, expanding sideways into the aisle, or combining somehow like the perpendicular suite model aboard the current Etihad or Singapore Airlines first class products. But they don’t: all you get is, presumably, a promise that the flight attendants will use the other aisle (which you can barely even see from your seat) for walking between first and business class.
With the myriad ongoing issues with the FICE/Allegris/Swiss Senses cabins — from certification to production quality, to the rollout of seat production to the third seatmaker, to the need to accept delivery of Lufthansa 787s with business class seats blocked out, to the prospect of installing counterweights to allow installation on Swiss’ A330s, to the as-yet-unresolved questions of continuity or change for the longhaul product aboard Austrian, Brussels, Discover, Edelweiss and now ITA — it is genuinely baffling that something like this is the focus of even a single person within the Lufthansa Group.
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