I am with BahrainLad
 

I agree with Bahrainlad on this one. I pay to sleep. I used to spend four nights a week as a pax on 744s. If I want to sit up and play with my computer, then BA's WTP product is fine for that.

Additional communications would be useful, but what can the office actually do? Divert the aircraft, no, but they can get me at the gate to turn around and go elsewhere.

I carry enough work onto the aircraft to last me the journey as it is thank you. Lack of oxygen and sleep is not a good place to start making corporate decisions at the speed of email.

If I recognise the handle, BahrainLad should have no trouble in "Spotting" who I am. However, I need a different handle here :) .

flat and horizontal beds are king. The best bit about the BA NNCW and NCW products are the rear facing seats as they get the pitch about right to make the blood go in the right direction for sleeping. When flying BA First, then I alway switch round to go head forward as it is easier to sleep that way.

Happy landings (and no jigsaw puzzles!)

I absolutely agree! :ok:

Just to stretch out and not have your knees and elbows knocking against someone elses during sleeping/ eating. etc is a godsend.

You could lift you legs into the air if you wish (I'm not called sixmilehighclub for nothing you know!) and theres no person in front of you to recline into your chicken casserole. The food is better and theres a wider range of higher quality drinks.

If you're clostrophobic, its far better too as you do feel theres much more space.

Now I hate to be picky (or maybe not), but jet lag is officially classified as a circadian rhythm disorder. So you may not be so tired when you get off because you had some sleep, but if you have crossed many time zones your body clock is still out of whack and I don't think that even BA has the technology to drag your circadian rhythm along with the seat. If it did, it would be worth more than £3000!

Compare what you feel like during the week after flying from UK->South Africa, as opposed to UK->Singapore. When flying North-South, the perceived benefits of club class only last one day. It's the same with flying east-west, you cannot buy yourself out of circadian rhythm pain by paying more for your seat.

Now if it important to be alert on that first day after a long flight, it may well be worth paying the extra for a flat seat, so for a few business travellers it may make sense. For most business travellers you should leave a day early and fly in the back, and get a proper nights sleep in a real bed before going to your meeting. Most business travellers don't get paid enough to make that extra day in the office pay back the extra expense of the flat seat. IMHO of course :)

Thought the floowing link may be useful - the company are making 8000 club class seats a month! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4808798.stm

Most business travellers don't get paid enough to make that extra day in the office pay back the extra expense of the flat seat. IMHO of course

Its not what you get paid, but rather the opportunity cost of that extra day.

I get charged out as a consultant at more per day than the cost of a one way club seat to the US - sadly, I don't get paid that much:}

Here's another way to think about it, slim_slag: Every Monday morning, you've a meeting that's an overnight flight away from home. Your boss lets you choose between Economy on the Saturday + hotel, or Business on the Sunday. You don't get paid the difference.

Would you prefer to lose every Saturday pm and Sunday, or 'only' every Sunday pm?

OK, hopefully this is an unrealistic scenario but when you travel a lot, those extra days really add up. And for the company, the fares are tax-deductible.

The Slag that is Slim Indeed you cannot. One friend of mine made an annual trip Michigan to UK and never experienced jet lag. His body just did not mind the forced change of time zones and he was fine on the first day and thereafter, no delayed jet lag. (Known in the trade as Lagged Lag := )

Since he was 6' 2" tall and only travelled in Y, I doubt that that the seat had anything to do with it.

"Officially", I agree.

But what people describe as jet lag is actually a combination of a lot of different things. There's the circadian rhythm disruption, of course. But there's also lack of sleep/tiredness/fatigue, exacerbated to various degrees by stress and anxiety; there's stiffness and soreness in various body parts from sitting immobile for too long, particularly if you really can't move very much; there's the lethargy that comes from immobility/lack of exercise; there's dehydration; there's that sticky-lived-in-for-too-long feeling in your clothes; and (for some) there's just the plain common-or-garden hangover.

The benefit of the entire end-to-end premium class service is that it deals with as much as possible of that (although the hangover and dehydration stuff remains largely a voluntarily-acquired disability) and leaves you, if you want, with only the circadian rhythm disruption. That also then leaves you streets ahead of where you would be if you were flying economy.

Never mind the office... I'm flying longhaul at the weekend, and will be aloft for all three Six Nations matches... aargghh... :eek: :( There will be no sleeping.

Ideally of course, proper flatbeds and WiFi would be nice... and that's where I think BA missed a trick.

Good point about fatigue - I was fortunate enough to do LHR-JFK in a little over 3 hours, back in the good ol' days, and felt remarkably fresh after the flight.

A couple of unusual reasons why it's worth paying the extra to travel in club, but then I did say I doff my cap to F3G for begin able to generate £2000 a day revenue, and would take it off and bow if he could do that for 44 weeks a year. If he can, then I think his boss should let him fly business class wherever he wanted (which would no doubt be billed to the client who would have to fly in the back if he was doing the same trip). crepello has another unusual requirement, and in his case I would recommend video conferencing, which has come on in leaps and bounds in the past few years. For the price of a few club round trips you could get some very nice kit indeed.
Yes I am sure it does, but only until the economy pax has had some sleep. The cure for being tired is quite simple and effective, get some sleep. By day two I doubt you could tell the difference between them (except the club passenger would be boasting about it :) )

Entirely agree, slim_slag, mostly because bandwidth is now so cheap. Sadly, there's always been a minority of alpha male wannabees that judge their importance by how many Sheraton points they can rack up.

Of course, there's lots of work that can't effectively be done over a video link, but they ought to be used much more frequently, if only out of consideration for the environment.

Without meaning any disrespect to F3G for what he does and how much he is charged out at, this is hardly unusual in today's business world.

In my own field, even relatively junior lawyers in City law firms will be charged out at such rates before they've had that much post-qualification experience. Equally sadly, they will only ever see a small fraction of that themselves.

I wish:mad: ! That's where I am at the moment and for the next 2-3 months. Every Sunday from East Coast to West Coast, back after 1-2 days via red eye.
Unfortunately, not on the real business class seats in AA and UA from JFK to LA and SFO but on the classical 737 "First Class" seats. Hahahaha "First Class", there is a good laugh:mad: :{ . I am actually looking forward to my monthly transatlantic flight in AA First so I can get some good sleep.
Forget transatlantic lie-flat - I want trans-US seats that are not 15 years old!
FC

I actually do a lot of work on the phone, not even video. My lifestyle improved over the last 3 years, once I started to be senior enough to say "no". (I know - the post above says something else, but that's hopefully temporary). You can have solid content conversations on the phone since nowadays, we are able to email presentations and other documents and talk about them. Wasn't possible to that extend 10 years ago.
But as you point out, limitations apply, especially when you are building up new clients. And when you are - as is often the case for me - building up a completely new team out of inexperienced people who need personal coaching and attention. Can't do that over the phone 3-6 timezones away (or more, sometimes).
As for the running comment about revenue - I wish I got 50% of my per-diem. And I am not a lawyer. Clients are happy to pay $$$$$ for many different flavors of professional expertise.
FC

Flying Con ;) Hhmm, well, it's another discussion altogether but: Working in Telecommunications for 25+ years I found that - as the technology entered every day life as fax machines/mobile phones/e-mail/internet then clients thought that they understood it and did not need an expert to tell them. Pointing out that buying a cordless phone at home and a network of 200 cordless phones in an office building was not the same thing ... was met by polite disagreement and end of sales pitch.

In other words, whereas the really big companies knew that they had complex installations and needed specialised help, at the middle and smaller end of the market, they thought that they understood it and could do without. "But it's just a telephone!" (and many other things besides). Now, all specialists say this across the years I am sure but it's just my observation of one of the changes that I (and colleagues/friends) have seen.

__________________
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Sorry, I didn't mean my comment about lawyers to sound as restrictive as I see it did. I've now edited my post above.

So,
its been a while now since this thread started.
I have travelled in Club and some of the crew that I have spoken to have seen the new seats. However they were not generally not willing to discuss details.
One did however say that the new seats were not any longer (I could do with 2 more inches) and that the front / back facing configuration was the same. They also added that apart from a few "tweaks" the new seats were essentially the same as the existing ones.
Has anyone else heard or seen any more details? Are any photos available?

All who have seen the seats have had to sign a strict confidentiality agreement before being allowed to, so it's not surprising that they're unwilling to say. And also unsurprising that there are no photos around - that would rather defeat the object of the exercise, wouldn't it? :)

The only other bit of detail that has leaked out is that the seats will be effectively wider, especially when in the bed mode. There's some speculation that this will be done by dropping the "armrest" on one side as the seat is reclined flat. That's a trick which is already found on some other current generation business class seats.

Various different reports of launch date - July, August or September. However, whichever one it is, we will be put out of our misery quite soon.

Down boy, down boy !! ;) :D

Next generation? Madness, hello modern world calling. Lufthansa have been using it for about 2 years, and the list of airlines with this is now pretty big. Personally whether there is internet access on-board affects my choice of carrier, surfing the web, listening to radio stations of my choice etc makes the intolerable experience of flying almost bareable.
BTW, Air New Zealand have a variant of the VS seat also.