Your author’s history with Finnair’s most recent business class product dates back nearly a decade, having been invited to Helsinki in 2017 to join frequent flyers and a variety of other contributors to give our thoughts on which passenger experience innovations would best serve the airline’s unusual route network and premium passenger base.
The answer, Finnair would decide, was none of the staggered or herringbone products on the market, choosing instead to launch the AirLounge seat developed by Collins Aerospace, a unique sofa-style pod that eschews recline for the ability to just slide down into sleep.
The seven years since 2017 bring us to a very different world, and not just because Finnair’s foundational route network model — connecting Asia to Europe the short way by overflying Russia — is not currently possible owing to reciprocal overflight bans following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It has thus taken some time to get aboard AirLounge, as your author did as a guest of the airline between Helsinki and Osaka this month. I’ll focus primarily on the hard product in this review — the food was fine, the wine was good, the coffee was strong, but you’re really here to read about AirLounge.
Initial impressions of the cabin are strong: boarding at door 2 in Helsinki brings you to a stylish and modern entryway, and turning left into business class presents a warm, calm cabin with the AirLounge sofa pods’ thermoplastics picking up the mood lighting, contrasting well with the deep blue fabric covering the seat.
At the seat, everything seems sensibly laid out. The two main storage areas are at the shoulder (perfect for emptying one’s pockets) and a deeper locker at the knee, which was surprisingly deep. There’s a shoe shelf underneath the seat, and Finnair helpfully has both small/medium and large/extra large slippers available for the flight.
Solving the “Mount Blankets” problem in this seat is easy: the footwell area has been certified for soft items, and indeed all but your two pillows are stowed away here.
Focussing in on the seat, I found it exceptionally comfortable both in seat mode and in bed mode. Seated, the width enables you to treat the space like a large and comfortable armchair, perhaps folding a leg underneath you, propping a pillow behind to adjust the space to your body type.
The electrically adjustable legrest enables a variety of supportive positions that were surprisingly pleasant, whether relaxing cross-legged — as many of Finnair’s Japanese passengers on the flight were doing, I noticed — or creating a sort of DIY la-z-boy style Z-bed experience.
To sleep, it’s a matter of pulling the single additional cushion up manually (this element felt like a strange addition — possibly a first-generation issue?), and then sliding down into bed.
I was able to find multiple positions both on my back and on my side, which is unusual in many business class seats.
As a side sleeper, I particularly liked the ability to retract the legrest ever so slightly to adjust my hip position — a real boon.
The almost entirely clear footwell area, open to the sidewall, enables a really long bed — I’m 190cm/6’3”, and was able to stretch out fully.
The high walls and acoustic baffle effect of the fabric wrapping round you was exceptionally good, both in terms of privacy — I couldn’t see a single other passenger, but without the maxi-suite “surprise flight attendant” issue — and in terms of sounds within the cabin.
The A350’s front cabin often hits that lovely-to-have problem of being too quite so you can hear all the small noises going on, but this problem wasn’t an issue with AirLounge.
I was surprised to find that the soft product was sub-par and, in places, genuinely bad. The larger pillow might have a lovely Marimekko design on it, but its material is plasticky and unpleasant against the skin — especially for those of us with stubble. The pillow slid around inside, making for a lumpen, uncomfortable experience.
Once Finnair is in a better financial position, it might want to have a rethink of these, perhaps incorporating something along the lines of a combination pocket-pack pillow-blanket roll given the flexibility of AirLounge.
I didn’t find the surface fabric as scratchy as I had at the Aircraft Interiors Expo, when it was brand new, but others — especially those with longer hair — might find otherwise. Again, a piece of soft product might help here.
Overall, though, I found AirLounge one of the best new business class seats I’ve sat in for years. There are a few first-generation elements to work through, and the soft product could do with some attention, but the revolutionary hype lives up to the onboard product experience.
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All images credited to the author, John Walton
