With Korean Air‘s recent announcement that they would eliminate First Class on certain routes beginning June we were awaiting to check their seat maps and see if it’s possible to select these seats for free when flying Business Class which is now the case.
Passengers with a Business Class ticket can now select the first row of Airbus A330 and Boeing 777-300, which used to be First Class and is separated from the main cabin for more quiet flight experience.
You can access Korean Air’s announcement from last month in the Korea Herald and Freddo also had an article out about the demise of First Class in general.
So how does this work?
You basically just book a regular Business Class ticket on routes where the A330 and B777-300 is being used. Mind you the Boeing B77W still features First Class so make sure you pick the right plane.
Seatmap of the Airbus A330:
Seatmap of the Boeing B777-300:
This is how that first row looks like:
The difference between the Korean Air Business Class seats and their former “First Class” on the A330/B773 are actually slim to none. You have a small cabin with more privacy and the ottoman but that’s about it.
Conclusion
All in all, this is a good opportunity to get a little bit nicer seat in a smaller cabin while utilizing a simple Business Class ticket. The service of Korean Air is rather basic and communication often a problem. Their crews English is really bad in most cases.
You can select your seat in KA’s website (absolutely terrible) under Manage Booking. There you might run into a problem when you have existing seat reservations already, as I experienced before when I wrote about Korean Air having one of the worst websites in the entire industry. Not much has changed since then.
