Do you know that sinking feeling when you get an email from your airline with the title ‘changes to your itinerary’? You’d be right to feel like that because such an email rarely spells something positive. At best, your experience stays roughly the same, at worst your schedule is upended or your seat downgraded. Well, let me share a story of such an email that ended up being a hugely positive development!

1. What was our plan again?
2. Qatar Airways’ Boeing 787-9’s seats are reverse herring bone seats
3. Then the email arrived…
4. What we will be flying now: Qsuite!
5. Summary

What was our plan again?

I had written some time ago about our next ‘big’ vacation: a trip to South Africa! Briefly, we will be flying Qatar Airways to Johannesburg via Doha, and then we fly back to New York with Ethiopian, from Cape Town via Addis Ababa. I also wrote a post on how to go about booking Qatar Airways, and I shared the experience of the actual booking process through Qatar Airways, which was not entirely smooth.

The itinerary we booked sees us departing New York-JFK around midnight. We will be flying on an Airbus A350-900 equipped with Qsuite business class seats: this is Qatar Airways multi-award winning business class hard product, well-known for its thoughtful design. Specifically, the comfortable seats, the nice design, and the flexibility, especially of the middle seats: these can be combined into a dual seat or even a quad, if you’re flying with a large group of people.

Qatar Airways’ Boeing 787-9’s seats are reverse herring bone seats

Then, originally, we were supposed to fly onboard a Boeing 787-9 from Doha to Johannesburg, departing a few hours after midnight and arriving closer to lunchtime. We were supposed to have a 5-hour layover of Doha – plenty to get to the lounge and enjoy, if a bit long, if you ask me.

The seats in the Boeing 787-9 are not the Qsuite business class that Qatar Airways is known for. Instead, these planes come equipped with a different seat, since the Qsuite would be too wide for the 787-9. These seats are the Adient Ascent seat, which come in a 1-2-1 configuration (so everybody has direct aisle access) and sports a reverse herring bone layout at the windows, and in the middle these are herring bone seats. These are the same seats that Hawaiian installed on their 787-9s, and are now also being introduced by American and United in their Boeing 787-9s. So, this is becoming a rather popular seat.

You can explore the seats at Qatar Airways’ nifty 3D visualization website, here.

By all means, the seat looks very nice. It may not be quite as wide as the Qsuite, and the herringbone configuration could come with a footwell that is a little bit tighter than on staggered seats such as the Qsuite would have (and this is what some reviewers have criticized). However, every suite has a door that fully closes, a large, crisp entertainment monitor, and modern device charging features. It does seem like storage is a little limited, unfortunately.

Then the email arrived…

The email stated primarily that there had been a schedule change:

• Our flight from JFK to Doha would leave at the same time, but arrive 5 minutes earlier.
• Our flight from Doha to Johannesburg would now leave about an our earlier, and arrive a little over an hour earlier.

Meaning that our 5-hour layover had now gone down to just 4 hours, which is excellent, as well as that our arrival into Johannesburg would be earlier. That would give us quite a lot more time to drive to the Kruger National Park, which is a drive of about 7 hours.

What we will be flying now: Qsuite!

The first thing you need to do whenever you get an email such as this, is to head to your booking through the airline’s website or app. In some cases you may need to confirm the change, and it’s best practice to confirm or re-select your seats, so that’s what I went to do. Indeed there was a notification that specifically requested to confirm the change, so I did. This prompted a new email confirming the change.

More importantly, we had originally selected seats 2A and 3A, and when I checked the itinerary it became immediately clear we were now seated in seats 3A and 4B instead. That is a mighty odd change, so I suspected the plane may have been swapped to a plane with Qsuite. Have a look at the seta map below:

On the left is the Boeing 787-9. Here you can see that every row has an A, E, F and K seat. On the right, now, is the A350-1000 with Qsuite. Mind you, when seeing the email or confirming the schedule I hadn’t seen the model yet, but Qsuite has the same numbering scheme anyway, regardless of plane type.

What you’ll see is that these staggered seats have an additional twist to them, namely that the ‘true’ window seats seats are actually in reverse, and the reverse seats are ‘A’ and the forward seats are ‘B’. The real giveaway here is that there are an A and a B seat, which is otherwise never the case for business class seats with a 1-2-1 configuration. Indeed, I was now sat in the ‘true’ (reverse) window seat, and my husband in the forward window seat. You can see a 3D rendering here.

I through this is quite neat. We will be able to try out the middle seats on the way to Doha, where we can being down the partition in the middle to make it a dual suite. Then on the way to Johannesburg, we can sample the window seats. We can lower the partition between the seats just next to the TV, and dine together this way.

I’m quite excited to try both configurations and will be sure to report back after the experience! Of course, Qatar Airways is notorious for last-minute changes, so who knows if this itinerary will actually turn out the way it’s currently planned. If anything else changes, I’ll let you know…

Summary

Some time ago we booked Qatar Airways business class for our flight from New York to Johannesburg, with a stop in Doha. I then received an email detailing a scheduled change, which turned out to be very positive. Besides a change in the departure time for our flight to Johannesburg, ensuring we arrive an hour earlier and only need to wait 4 hours during our layover, I also found that there had been a plane swap resulting in us now flying Qsuite on the second leg of our trip. Thus we now have an all-Qsuite trip. Hopefully Qatar Airways will not have any further changes and we will be able to enjoy this award-winning business class seat for full the duration of our itinerary.