What the FOX: Lufthansa’s Future Onboard Experience soft product is damnation by faint PaxEx

Lufthansa's new "top premium product" initiative, FOX, comes so laden with spurious waffle — and deckchairs-on-the-Titanic fiddling in the margins of its passenger experience — that it sums up the problems the airline is facing all too neatly.

By John Walton 7 min read
A passenger in business class receives a drink from, presumably, a flight attendant.

In a week where Lufthansa is reportedly planning to announce several thousand job cuts, apparently due to affect not just Lufthansa-the-airline but other parts of the Lufthansa Group, the pre-reveal of the future launch of its Future Onboard Experience, FOX, might read like little more than an attempt to distract from the airline’s woes. 

But, in reality, the situation is worse than that, at least if Lufthansa corporately genuinely believes what it is putting out about FOX. The airline’s latest all-caps, letter-fudged acronym follows FICE — Future InterContinental Experience — after the recent decision to “disintegrate” its FICE cabin team.

With the disaster that is, was, and looks to continue to be the story of Allegris, FOX would need to be exceptional in order to rescue Lufthansa-the-airline from a corporate nightmare of its own making.

Alas.

FOX “renews experiences and processes for passengers on board”, the airline says, revealed as a sort of pre-announcement in public this week of initiatives that airline staffers have been discussing within the industry for quite some time now, and which Lufthansa now says are planned for “spring 2026”. 

“FOX takes off”, says the marketing spiel, as a shirt-clad arm — of, presumably, a flight attendant not openly criticising Lufthansa’s front cabin strategy to the German aerospace press — hands a hot beverage to a passenger seated in one of the Allegris business class seats that Lufthansa is currently unable to use for passengers on its 787.

A passenger in business class receives a drink from, presumably, a flight attendant.
This image is set in the cabin of a Lufthansa Allegris A350, a type that, er, took off without its then-uncertified first class cabin installed. Image: Lufthansa
The Up Front AnalysisLufthansaFOXFirst ClassBusiness ClassPremium Economy ClassEconomy ClassFICE/Allegris/Swiss Senses
John Walton

Editor in chief of The Up Front, with two decades of experience reporting across the global aviation industry, specialising in business and first class, seats, cabins and the passenger experience.