Japan Airlines business class review – A350 from Tokyo to London

This is our review of Japan Airlines business class on the A350-1000.

At the end of my brief time in Japan it was time to try out business class on JAL’s A350-1000 service to London. This is JAL’s new flagship aircraft sporting brand new cabins from head to toe and it now operates on one of the two daily flights between Tokyo Haneda and London Heathrow – JL43.

(Haneda is the closer of Tokyo’s two airports. A new international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened in the 2010s and since then it has welcomed more long haul services. The Japanese government prioritises Haneda as a hub for intercontinental services connecting onwards in Japan whilst Narita, the other airport, is prioritised for intra-Asian connectivity. That’s good news for UK travellers since it is the more convenient of the two.)

My review of Premium Economy on the Japan Airlines A350 is here. JAL provided my flights for review purposes. HfP paid for its incidental costs.

You can earn and spend Avios with Japan Airlines

As a reminder, Japan Airlines is part of the oneworld alliance.

You are able to earn and redeem Avios for these cabins via the British Airways, Qatar Airways, Finnair or Iberia programmes.

JAL check-in and lounge at Tokyo Haneda

Once I arrived at Terminal 3 I made my way to the JAL counters which are easily sign-posted. To my surprise, it seems that JAL operates an almost exclusively self-service operation even for its business class passengers.

This involves checking in, printing a boarding pass and bag tags at a free-standing counter before heading to the self-baggage drop. It also seems to take photos for the biometric boarding later on, which may be why it is done this way.

The system is quick and easy, although I’d still prefer a real human being in business class.

The staff made a point to direct me to the priority security services which I was thankful for as the standard queue was quite long. With priority security I was through in no time thanks to the new 3D scanners which let you leave everything inside your bag.

You can read my review of JAL’s Sakura Sky View lounge at Haneda Terminal 3 here.

Onboard JAL’s A350-1000 business class

I had already walked through the business cabin on my first flight, when I reviewed the premium economy cabin behind it.  I was again struck by the high levels of privacy JAL’s new business class cabin affords with exceptionally high suite walls and doors.

At 132cm tall they aren’t quite as high as Qatar Airways’ current Qsuite (143cm) but they’re not far off, and way ahead of most other business class suites. Even walking down the aisle you can barely see the tops of people’s heads when the suite doors are closed.

Japan Airlines’ A350-1000 has 54 business class seats set across two cabins in a 1-2-1 layout. This is a staggered layout, rather than angled herringbone, so every seat is forward facing with some closer to the aisle and some further away.

I made my way down to seat 15D, which I had selected a week before departure. Sadly the window seats were all taken, as that would have been my preferred option, but I did manage to get one of the seats further away from the aisle. With as much privacy as these seats have that’s not as important, but I still prefer to be less close to people going past.

Fortunately, the central seats have a very sturdy privacy divider which I quickly raised!

JAL is the first airline to offer the Safran Unity business class suite; other airlines that have selected it are Qantas (for their Project Sunrise A350s) and Air India for its fleet refurbishment program. This was my first time trying the Unity platform, having flown numerous other staggered seats from other manufacturers.

JAL has gone for a relatively dark grey and burgundy colour palette. Whilst it’s smart it’s not my absolute favourite – the grey is a bit too cold for me – but it does feel very Japanese when you look at the cabins on Japan Rail’s Shinkansen bullet trains, for example.

Let’s take a closer look. As with virtually all business class suites, it consists of a seat, a footwell and a side console table with two levels:

Wireless phone charging is integrated and you also have easy access to the headphone jack, universal mains socket and USB-C and USB-A ports.

Above the console table is a lovely feature light that adds a bit of design interest to the suite (brighter overhead reading lights are also available).

This seat has one of the most spacious foot coffins out there. It’s both deep and wide, far better than what you find on virtually any other seat like this, including Qsuite which has quite a restrictive area. On most seats I’m pretty close to both ends of the seat in bed mode, but with this my feet weren’t touching the end at all. It’s very spacious as a bed.

Speaking of bed, the seat comes with a veritable mountain of bedding including a mattress cover, a duvet and a pillow, all wrapped in plastic although I’ve unwrapped them here:

The mattress cover is not fitted so it does slide around a bit and is not padded. I did see some customers with mattress pads when I left the aircraft so this does seem to be available – something I had missed and perhaps needs to be advertised better! The duvet was comfortable although I thought the pillow could have been better.

What this seat does have is a vast amount of storage – more than I ever needed.

Let’s start at the top and work our way down. There’s a cupboard-style storage unit above the console table, perfect for storing headphones:

You have another storage unit inside the console table with a flip up lid; this is good for glasses, phone, watch, jewellery etc. Basically, things you don’t want to lose and can easily see thanks to the shallow depth and in-storage lighting:

There’s the slide-to-open hanger for your coat, replete with semi-transparent plastic door which is a cool effect, particularly with the lighting which adds a slight glow when closed:

Underneath this is a flip-down storage compartment you can use for smaller shoes:

Whilst, finally, there’s a huge amount of space underneath your foot rest.

For all but the biggest suitcases you won’t have to use the overhead storage bins if you don’t want to. Speaking of which, JAL has opted to remove the centre bins in business class to create a greater sense of space. There’s still plenty of storage for all in the window-side lockers.

Unfortunately, with the ceiling height so far above the suite, it doesn’t make much sense to install personal air vents and these have been removed. (One thing I’d love to see is more airlines and seat manufacturers integrating these into the seats, as with doored suites the air circulation is not as good as I’d like it.)

Whilst I didn’t have a window seat, I did notice that JAL is one of the first airlines to opt for Airbus’ electro-dimming windows. These are similar to those on the Boeing 787 but dim MUCH faster and are fully black-out.

In-flight entertainment and wifi

Opposite the seat is a large 24″ screen. As I noted in my premium economy review JAL has made the effort to stock it with HD content to make use of its 4K resolution. So many airlines don’t do this – in fact JAL is one of the first I’ve noticed it on – and it makes such a difference to the in-flight entertainment experience.

You can, of course, also tap into the onboard cameras for an outside view of the aircraft:

JAL’s content catalogue is not huge with about 120 English-language films available. Having watched Conclave on my outbound flight I followed it up with Gladiator 2 on the return which I can only describe as entertainingly bad.

One of the features I was keen to try was Safran’s ‘Euphony’ headphoneless speaker system which is built into the headrest. You can therefore watch the in-flight entertainment either with the provided noise cancelling headphones, which are quite good:

…. or you can pair your own or use the buit-in headphones. I tried the latter for novelty value and was not particularly impressed; to hear anything you had to bend the headrest right to your ears and even then the quality was not very good, given the overall noise of the cabin – even on the quiet A350. I think we can write the feature off as a gimmick rather than practical, but credit to Safran and JAL for trying something new.

Wifi is free for business class passengers. The process to claim this is convoluted as you have to request a promo code from a separate webpage and then input it in the wifi portal. I’ve not seen any other airline do it this way and I don’t know why JAL does; other airlines just need your surname and seat number.

Availability can be limited depending on the flight routing; as we were coming over the North Pole we were out of satellite coverage for the majority of the flight. I had trouble connecting but I think this was down to my DNS settings, which I have since resolved.

JAL amenity kit

Waiting at my seat was a brightly coloured amenity kit provided in partnership with Heralbony – not a brand I was familiar with – a menu. a bottle of water, slippers and a warming eye mask.

I was surprised that there were no pyjamas as these are a common feature in Japanese hotels, where they are washed and reused. Instead, you get a sort of flannel cardigan to wear in case you get cold, although JAL likes to keep the cabin warm so I didn’t.

Inside the amenity kit you have a range of goodies including facial tissues, ear plugs, a dental kit, eye mask and moisturiser and, to my surprise, a phone stand and charging cable:

JAL business class food and service

Service started with a welcome drink of champagne or juice. Of course, I went for the champagne which was served in a solid plastic glass – a shame it wasn’t real glass, although I’m told this is a safety requirement by the Japanese regulator:

JAL stocks a number of champagnes on board, with at least two on offer: the Delamotte Brut NV plus the Lelarge-Pugeot Tradition Extra-Brut NV or Duval-Leroy Brut Reserve.

This was followed by a hot towel after the seatbelt sign went off.

The initial food service was slow. About 50 minutes after take-off, crew came round taking meal orders. About ten minutes later a snack and drink were served; some nuts and some delicious dip with bread sticks (not entirely sure what it was!)

This was followed by the main meal. JAL offers a Japanese and a Western menu and collaborates with several local chefs to curate these. Of course, I couldn’t say no to the Japanese menu with a bento box of starters including sakura shrimp, wagyu beef, grilled salmon, simmered abalone and octopus:

Note the iconic crane chopstick rest!

The main course was stewed Japanese beef cheek and Ren’s special curry (the chef who curated this particular meal). It came with a block of rice wrapped in paper, some pickles and miso soup. It was delicious:

This was followed by dessert, a matcha bavarois with sweet red beans and green tea:

(The ‘international’ alternative featured a sashimi salad, beef fillet steak or steamed rockfish main course and strawberry matcha buttercream cake.)

As you can imagine, I was pretty stuffed by this point. I decided to take a nap on this long day flight and prepared my bed. Not knowing there were additional mattress toppers available, I experienced the slight gap in padding of the Safran Unity seat – not it’s strongest point.

Still, I managed to get a good few hours rest – enough to tide me over for the day as I didn’t want to oversleep. The seat really is very spacious in bed mode.

The second in-flight meal was available on demand. I think this is a great idea as it means you can eat whenever you fancy, and also reduces the pressure on crew to deliver a service to every passenger at once.

There were loads of options to choose from for the second meal – two chef-led menus (Japanese and international) as well as another menu of international cuisine. Options included sandwiches, a whitebait and salmon roe rice bowl, pasta with garlic tomato sauce, Keema Curry, JAL Original Noodles, falafal and more.

I went for the Japanese washoku plate which comes with miso-grilled swordfish, curried lotus root potato salad, steamed rise, miso soup and simmered kelp, pickled plum and white radish. It is served as one dish:

I enjoyed that, and then still a bit peckish I thought I’d try something else too, this time the Sangenton pork cutlet sandwich and yuzu dressed salad:

I could have kept eating but in my own best interest I stopped!

Conclusion

If you want to travel in style (and comfort) then Japan Airlines’ flagship business class is certainly one way of doing it.

Whilst the seat is not perfect – a gap between the seat cushions was annoying – it’s more private and spacious than almost any other business class seat out there, with tall sidewalls and an expansive footwell that should allay anyone who dislikes them.

Paired with JAL’s unique menus, which lean into wonderful Japanese cuisine but still offer western and international choices, you can’t go wrong. You can find out more on JAL’s website here.

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