From Seoul to Paris in Air France’s refurbished Boeing 700-300ER business class: A review

About a year ago, Air France began to roll out its refurbished Boeing 700-300ER which replaced an aging 2-3-2 layout with closed-door suites in a 1-2-1 format. After flying to East Asia with KLM’s 787-9 business class, I recently returned home in seat 10A on this refurbished Boeing from Seoul to Paris. It was a long flight, nearly 14 hours in the air, which gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with the amenities and features of this new seat in the refurbished plane.

The Air France Boeing 777-300ER refurbished business class onboard experience

Our routing was a longer than necessary path over China, Kazakhstan, the Black Sea, and then into Europe, as a result of the inability to overfly Russia these days. Incredibly, two days before my flight, AF 267 flew eastward out of Seoul to Paris and over the pole, which must have been a shorter duration given the unusually strong jet stream that everyone is talking about these days.

Perhaps the first thing that you notice about the new seat is the illuminated winged horse on the seat’s personal compartment which holds a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a mirror. Unfortunately, and oddly, it stays illuminated for the entire flight, as do the seat and light controls next to the tray table, the magazine pocket by the footwell, and the footwell itself. The lights do seem to dim when you put your seat into a fully flat position, but there’s no turning them off completely.  

The seat has plenty of places to charge any and all of your devices including a wireless phone charger, a USB A and USB C port, and an international charging outlet. There’s also WiFi available and although it’s 30 Euros for the full flight, they offer free messaging for the entire flight.

Perhaps the best thing about the seat is the wide footwell. It doesn’t feel like you’re putting your feet in a tiny coffin and when you lie down, if you are a side sleeper such as myself, you aren’t hitting any parts of the seat with your knees or toes.

One of the few complaints I had about the hardware is that as with far too many planes these days, there were no air vents above the seats. Luckily, I brought my baby fan with me, and the cabin was kept at a fairly comfortable temperature.

The screen is big, bright and can be connected to with your own Bluetooth headset. It has an anti-glare technology as well, which was a great feature for a daytime. The camera feature, which can be pointed downward or forward, was incredibly sharp, unlike anything I’d ever seen on other planes with this fun option.

While I had a couple of glasses of Pommery champagne, and a cheese and fruit plate after we took off, I didn’t have anything else to eat as I’d already enjoyed some great Korean food in the Korean Airlines lounge at Incheon (full review of that coming up shortly). While Air France catering from Paris is usually fantastic, the dining can be hit or miss from outbound stations.

Service was somewhat brusque, and unlike on the KLM flight to Osaka, there was no proactive service once the meal had been delivered. For a fourteen-hour flight, one would think that the flight attendants might do a couple additional spins through the aisle with water. When I made it up to the galley to request some, I was ignored and made to feel that I was a burden on the flight attendants. It was almost eight hours into the flight before some trash on my tray table was picked up.

How to tell if you’re on the new Air France refurbished Boeing 777-300ER

While now all the other Boeing 700-300 ER business classes cabins are 1-2-1, you’ll be able to determine if you are flying Air France’s new refurbished Boeing 777-300ER in two ways. First, there is no La Premiere first class on these planes. So, if you see a first-class cabin, that’s not going to be a new plane.

Similarly, because there is no first-class cabin, the two business cabins (split into 32 and 20 seats) begin with rows 1 and 9. The second of the two cabins feels slightly more private as there are only five rows of seats as opposed to eight. In these two rows, there’s actually even more room in the footwells because these “bulkhead” seats don’t have anyone in front of them allowing for an even wider area. While the seats are not available at the time of booking, you should be able to select them upon checking in. However, I was unable to get a mobile boarding pass because I had to scan my passport and by the time I was at the airport, all the seats had already been selected. Next time!

At the airport when I was printing myself my boarding pass, I got an alert that there had been an aircraft swap and that I had been assigned a new seat, so I think I was lucky to get the new model.

The new Air France Boeing 700-300ER cabin is extremely comfortable option and the best of all of the Air France Boeing 777-300ER business class configurations. While the amenity kit and meal service aren’t any different from other Air France flights, the hardware is more comfortable. Aside from the somewhat moody and lazy cabin crew, it was a nice flight, made enjoyable as well by the fact that there was virtually no turbulence.

Economy and premium economy has also been revamped on this new plane, and though I didn’t poke my head back there this time around, I’ll be flying with Air France to Dubai early next year and I have a feeling that this new Boeing 777-300ER will be rolled out on that route as well.

I found a fairly cheap fare from BRU-AMS-KIX and ICN-CDG-ZYR at just over $2000. However, you can also book Air France business class flights with Delta Skymiles. A 75,000 welcome bonus from the Chase Sapphire card, which can be transferred to your Skymiles account, is enough to book a one-way business class flight from, for example, Bombay to Paris.