My friend Yaroslav had the chance to recently try Qatar Airways’ new business class product, which became available between Doha and London as of this past weekend. While I still hope to review the product soon, I’m thrilled he shared his experience, given how new this product still is.
Yaroslav is a software entrepreneur and traveller from Kiev, Ukraine. In his free time he enjoys photography, filmmaking and writing endeavours, which he shares on his Apertoura.com project (https://medium.com/@apertoura)
For the past several years I have been fascinated with the rapid and continuing improvements that are happening in airlines’ premium cabins. Within less than a decade the whole concept of what a business class seat should be has shifted significantly. From just a recliner — to fully-flat, aisle accessible beds, offices and dining rooms — at 41,000 feet.
Earlier this year Qatar Airways announced a further improvement to the concept. Named QSuites, these fully enclosed seats, available as a single, double or quadruple pod, promise to enable passengers to spend time together with their family while flying or get work done in teams.
Having plans to visit Doha around the dates of the scheduled commencement into service, I decided to book my flight to Qatar via London, rather than Frankfurt, which would have been more convenient. Although Qatar Airways is infamous for their unpredictable delays and unrealistic promises — I thought the worst case scenario would be an extra hour or two spent in transit and I can easily switch to QR’s A350, A380 or 787 all of which fly from DOH to LHR daily (avoiding the significantly worse pre-QSuites 777 business class). And they all feature the great reverse herringbone seat, Wi-Fi and in case of the A380 — a bar. Not a bad proposition either way 🙂
For days I’ve constantly awaited alerts from flightradar24 about the whereabouts of A7-BED, the first 777–300ER in Qatar Airways’ fleet to be reconfigured with QSuites. At the end of May it left for Zurich, the location of the reconfiguration, had done a test flight for a few hours over Switzerland, flew to Le Bourget — to be demonstrated to the world and finally on the 24th of June — flew back to Doha, for the inaugural QSuites flight to London Heathrow, flight QR7. That gave me confidence that I will have the chance to try out their new product on the following day.
I left Paris early in the morning, taking Air France’s 787 (operated currently once per day with flight AF1680) and had almost 8 hours to kill until departing to Doha in the afternoon. The benefit was that I could check out the Qatar Premium Lounge in detail. The lounge is located in Terminal 4, nearby gate 6 and is open from 5AM to 9:30PM and welcomes Qatar Airways first and business class passengers.
As I arrived during the morning rush hour — the lounge was fairly packed with most of the casual seating occupied, but the À la carte restaurant wasn’t as full. It’s amazing how Qatar Airways operates a decent restaurant for just 6 flights a day. At 11AM they were finishing serving the breakfast.
Qatar lounge granola and orange juice