Back in May, Hawaiian Airlines revealed its new business class products. For the first time in the Airline’s history they’d be offering lie-flat seats. While new for Hawaiian, lie-flat seats are nothing new. But, since Hawaiian primarily serves leisure travelers, it’s understandable that they’d take their time deciding. And over the past couple of months they slowly began adding aircraft equipped with the new lie-flat seats to its fleet. The seats weren’t bookable at the time; rather aircraft were assigned to routes at random. But now the Hawaiian Air lie-flat seats are now bookable for travel beginning December 5, 2016.
The new lie-flat seats will be available on the following routes out of Honolulu:
- Narita, Japan
- Brisbane, Australia
- Sydney, Australia
- Aukland, New Zealand
Routes being served with the new premium cabin will expand as more aircraft are retrofitted with the new seats. Hawaiian should complete retrofitting all 23 of its A330-200s by the end of 2017.
The routes the seats are being used on initially make sense, as they are among Hawaiian’s longest. It’s interesting, though, that they will be using these aircraft on only one of their two Tokyo routes. But even that’s understandable, as Haneda likely has much higher demand than Narita does due to it’s much more convenient location.
What Hawaiian didn’t reveal at the time of the new premium cabin reveal, however, was what changes would be made to their soft product. As expected, though, Hawaiian has made changes to these elements. The new premium cabin will now feature amenities kits designed by famous local designer Sig Zane. This includes a Sig Zane designed quilt and pillow.
If Sig Zane sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s also responsible for the livery on Hawaiian’s commuter subsidiary Ohana by Hawaiian.
Hawaiian’s meal service will also see some tweaks including new dinnerware, linens and trays.
The menu will continue to be developed by Hawaiian Air’s Executive Chef, Chai Chaowasaree.
The new catering will even include a selection of specialty cocktails, in addition to a full bar including beers, and wines curated by Hawaii Master Sommelier Chuck Furuya.
Premium cabin customer will also receive complimentary access to Hawaiian’s Plumeria Lounge.
Want to redeem miles for these seats? Award tickets redeem via HawaiianMiles will cost you 130,000 miles (saver) to 260,000 miles (flex) for the initial four routes. A better value, of course, would be to redeem Korean SkyPass miles, which transfer 1:1 from Chase Ultimate Rewards. A roundtrip premium cabin award ticket will cost you just 140,000 miles to Australia and Japan.
Paid tickets appear to begin at about $2,800 roundtrip. Interestingly, prices are often the same on both Narita and Haneda routes, despite only Narita having the lie-flat seat.
They look nice, but they have stiff competition with Delta Airlines from JFK and Delta is about $1500 CHEAPER than Hawaiian airlines. I wonder if they’ll lower their prices and be more competitive? They’re also more expensive than United airlines from EWR and both United and Delta have the lie flat seats as well.
Well, considering that these planes aren’t flying to JFK, you can’t compare the pricing/product with Delta. The pricing would be for international medium-long haul travel, since none of those destinations are within the US.
Not flying YET; they are due to roll out the lie flat for that segment. Regardless, as nice as the seats look, they are not on-par with Delta, maybe more so with United which has the older seats.
I’m sure the flight attendants are nicer than United’s – that’s not too hard to do.
All valid points Amanda & Garrett. While the retrofitted aircraft will eventually make its way to JFK, I think it’ll be after NRT at least. There Hawaiian faces stiffer competition from JL, ANA, and DL. While UA does fly direct out of Newark, Hawaiian is the only airline that flies out of JFK direct to HNL year round. Plus they have feed from JetBlue and codeshare with Korean, etc.
While non on-par with Delta’s product, I believe the layout at least will be fairly popular. Since most traveling to Hawaii are for leisure anyway, the 2+2+2 seating may be seen as a good thing for all the couples that’ll likely end up in those seats. Service… really depends on your flight crew. I’ve had good, and I’ve had incredibly indifferent crews. I think for now should be better than UA, but if UA begins to really step things up under Moniz, then that may change in the not-too-distant future!