One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they say, so it seems churlish to look a cabin upgrade in the tech.
I had the good fortune on a recent Lufthansa flight from Johannesburg to Frankfurt to have my boarding pass torn up at the gate. That usually means one has been assigned a new seat, and the hope is that it is going to be in an upgraded cabin.
So it was that I found myself exploring a business class seat on the upper deck of a Boeing 747-8. I won’t pretend that a lie-flat seat is not the defining feature of business class. But then, we all kind of have experience lying flat.
What we don’t all have is the experience of the Lufthansa business class infotainment system. For that, we should all be grateful.
It is a kindness to say it feels like a throwback to basic in-flight systems from 20 years ago. At least, back then, they were working with the tech they had. The concept of UX, or user experience, was almost unknown then. It still, it seems, remains unknown in certain airline circles now.
But to be fair, let’s start with the positives. The Business Class seats greet flyers with a snack in a paper bag at their seats, along with amenities bags and a cutely packed mattress for the lie-flat bits. Seat controls include the standard trio, an upright-recline-flat configuration, with minor adjustments to foot rest and back support, as per SAA Business Class issue circa 2014. No, aircraft tech does not get upgraded regularly.
So far so comfortable, but nothing to Instagram about in delight or blog in rage.
And then you get to the infotainment.
Before we talk about the UX, let’s talk about the CX (customer experience). I do not know an adult traveller who has an active social or work life who does not want Internet access on board. (Yeah, yeah, you like to be cut off from the world for those 8 or 10 or 16 hours, but we don’t really believe you.) More and more airlines recognise this as a hygiene issue: it’s become a need, not a want. As a result, more and more airlines offer a free basic tier of Wi-Fi for messaging, and then ratchet up the credit card screws depending on whether you want web browsing as well, and then whether you want it for a short period or the full flight.
Lufthansa is not one of these. It starts out with a paid tier for Messaging. Granted, it’s only 5 Euros, but that is R100 in rant (or Rand) money, enough to buy Showmax for a month. For something even as basic as email, one has to go to the next paid, or Premium level: 15 Euros for 2 hours, or 25 Euros for the full flight. That’s what you pay on the ground for a full month of reasonably fast fibre-to-the-home, in rants.
So, as travellers, we are already irritated. Then comes the canned entertainment. The ask is not too hard. Provide a decent range, and a decent menu to select from the range, and you have happy customers. Well, someone who helped design online banking sites in the 1990s moved on to airlines, because someone thought it was a good idea to create almost entirely text-based lists of movies and their descriptions, in a font size they borrowed from optometrists.
Ironically, this is where Economy passengers have an advantage. Due to their crammed in circumstances, they are much closer to the screen, and may even be able to read the text without moving closer. The Business passenger has to unstrap to achieve this fairly basic task.
And that sums it all up: this is as basic as Business Class gets, but even then gets some of the basics wrong.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on social media on @art2gee.