Sacrebleu! A Disappointing Business Class Flight on Air France’s New A350

Last year, I took a flight from Paris to Mexico City in Air France’s La Premier cabin and it lived up to high expectations. My most recent Air France flight—on the same route but in Air France’s feted A350-900 business class cabin—not so much.

I was seated in 10A, a wonderfully spacious bulkhead that some reviewers have christened the world’s best business class seat. There’s something to that; it’s a really good seat.

The fact that I still didn’t have a good flight despite a world class seat is a testament to how bad everything else was. To ace the first half of an exam and still fail requires you to bomb the second part of the test.

I’ll write a full review of the flight in the coming days but for now, I wanted to quickly outline what made this flight a dud. 

Bad food

I think it’s reasonable to expect good food from the national airline of a food-obsessed country like France, and I know it’s reasonable to expect palatable food from a business class flight in 2024. My sad lunch in Air France’s business class didn’t meet either expectation. A picture of my main course, cod with cauliflower puree and grilled buckwheat, will probably underscore this point better than anything I could write. 

Astonishingly, this dish tasted worse than it looked—and, as you can see, it looked like cat food. Inedibly salty, fishy, and bone dry, I couldn’t stomach more than half a bite. The appetizer, though much less offensive, didn’t taste of much at all. I ultimately filled up on bread but got hungry later in the flight and ordered orange and pink grapefruit from the “fruit and frozen desserts section” of the snack menu. Here, again, a picture is worth a thousand words. 

Now, in principle, there’s nothing wrong with four grapes and a clementine, it’s just not what was listed on the menu. When I asked for grapefruit instead of what I got, the flight attendant insisted, pointing at the grapes, that this was in fact grapefruit. I left it at that instead of responding that, yes, grapes are a fruit, but they’re taxonomically distinct from grapefruit and if the menu writer wanted to be sneaky, they could’ve referred to grapes as “grape fruits” in the same way that a few weirdos call pistachios “pistachio nuts.” In any case, I find it best to avoid arguing with anyone who has a certain degree of control over one’s food.

Service issues

Lunch service didn’t begin until nearly 90 minutes into the flight and my last plate was cleared around four hours after takeoff. That’s really, really slow. Even in first class cabins with elaborate five-course menus, meals don’t take more than a couple hours.

There were other problems too. Dropped drink and food orders, frosty service from many of the flight attendants, and a general lack of attentiveness that made the experience feel disorganized and far off the standard I expected.

Stuff was broken

I discovered soon after takeoff that my door was inoperable. According to the flight attendant, there were three doors that weren’t working in the business class cabin, which, on a plane this new, is surprising. 

More disappointingly, Wi-Fi was unavailable. That wouldn’t be as big a problem on an eastbound flight, but during a daytime flight on which more people want to work, it’s pretty inconvenient.

Again, on such a new plane, I’d expect pretty much everything in working order.

Bad bedding

Passengers in business class were provided one small pillow and a thin blanket. For a flight blocked at over 12 hours, that seems stingy. Mattress pads are increasingly common on flights of this length, so I feel like more substantial blankets or comforters aren’t too much to ask

Ugh

So many elements of the experience fell short—bad food, slow service, broken equipment, and inadequate bedding—and it felt like Air France took what should have been a buffet of their best and turned it into a smorgasbord of missed opportunities. Even the world’s best business class seat couldn’t save it.