Cathay Pacific will remove first class across its 777-300ER fleet from the middle of this year, replacing the dated suites with its all-new high-privacy business class pods.
The move will make Cathay first class exclusive to its Boeing 777-9 jets, which are due to arrive in 2025 with a luxurious new first class design which could possibly carry the ‘Halo’ brand.
Vivian Lo, Cathay’s General Manager of Customer Experience and Design, confirmed the 777 revamp to Executive Traveller during an interview on the sidelines of the airline’s 2024 premium economy launch.
The 777-300ERs “will just be three cabins: business, premium economy and economy,” Lo told Executive Traveller.
This will avoid the obvious complication of trying to justify the higher price of a first class ticket on jets where the business class offering will be markedly superior, at least in practical terms of the ‘hard product’ of the seat and video screen.
Cathay’s current six-berth Boeing 777-300ER first class debuted in 2007, with revamps in 2013 and 2017 – and despite its age, the spacious ‘open suite’ design remains a favourite of travellers, especially when paired with Cathay’s high standards in first class food, drinks and service.
Upgrading the 30-strong Boeing 777-300ERs with the new Aria Suites business class will begin mid-year and is expected to take as much as three years, though to mid-2027, “although we are doing a lot to step that up so that we speed up the whole process,” Lo shares.
But as each refitted 777-300ER rolls out, it will be crowded by several rows of business class at the pointy end.
The total number of business class seats isn’t expected to largely change, however: most of the additional overall space will be taken up by premium economy, which is expanding from 32 seats to 48 seats – a 50% increase which speaks to Cathay’s confidence in the growth of the premium economy segment.
Source: https://www.executivetraveller.com/news/cathay-777-300er-first-class
