Swiss Senses: Swiss International Airlines Unveils New Long-Haul Cabin

Only a couple of days after parent company Lufthansa unveiled its new premium cabins, Swiss International Airlines followed suit and presented its new long-haul interior to the public. It is called Swiss Senses and is basically a copy of Lufthansa’s new layout Allegris, but dressed in red and white.

If you are eager to get to know the product, you will have to exercise some patience. The first planes sporting the new look will take the skies not earlier than 2025. Swiss’ fleet of Airbus A330 and A350 aircraft will receive the new design, as well as their Boeing 777 aircraft. Their remaining Airbus A340 are phased out by the time the new cabin is implemented across the fleet.

New First Class Featuring Doors

Swiss is one of the few airlines left still featuring a First Class across their entire long-haul fleet. It does not come as a big surprise that it will remain on board their A330s. The airline will still reduce First Class capacity in these plane types, reducing the number of available seats from eight to four (actually three-and-a-half). The latter is because Swiss will also introduce a middle-row double suite to their planes, like Lufthansa announced earlier this week. While there are no renderings of said suite, you can easily spot it on the seat map:

The new design is heavily inspired by Lufthansa, it basically looks like Allegris with a different color scheme. The rendering offer a second difference: The suites located at the window seem to be narrower than Lufthansa’s new product. This is due to the fact that the A330 has a slimmer fuselage than the A350 in Lufthansa’s preview pics:

With a 2-meter seat pitch, the 77 cm wide seats still offer a lot of comfort to distract you from the fact you are actually trapped in a pressurized metal tube for several hours. If that doesn’t do the job, the 27-inch screen certainly will.

Just like in Lufthansa’s upcoming First Class, sliding doors will maximize privacy for premium travellers.

Swiss Overcomplicates Business Cabin As Well

Many people were flabbergasted by Lufthansa’s announcement to define (and probably sell) seven different seats in their business class cabin. Swiss did not hesitate to follow here, either. You can find seven different seat types in the following seat map:

1. Front row suites (i.e. 8A)
2. Extra-Space Seat (dubbed Throne, i.e. 9E)
3. Window seat (i.e. 9K)
4. Seat with extra large bed (z.B. 10G)
5. Privacy Window Seat (last row, i.e. 14K)
6. Double seat (last row, i.e. 15D + 15G)
7. “Regular” business class seat (i.e. 12G)

While there are differences in location and size of the seats’ surroundings, every passenger will have access to inflight entertainment (d’uh), wireless charging facilities (cool) and regulate the heating and cooling of the chair (literally cool).

Premium Economy Coming to Airbus Planes

In this section of the cabin, Swiss doesn’t make any alterations to its current product. The news is that Swiss’ is bringing premium economy to their A330 fleet – until now, only the 777-300ER features a premium economy section. Passengers can expect 21 premium economy seats in a 2-3-2 pattern across three rows from 2025 onwards.

Economy Gets A Facelift

Like many other carriers, Swiss introduces slimmer seats with narrower armrest in economy class. The airline will trim down the back padding and cushioning, while upscaling entertainment screens at the same time. So even if you are leaving the plane with back pain, at least the movies you watched were in 4K resolution.

Swiss promises to use the space saved by narrower back rests to introduce extra-legroom seats in the first rows of their economy cabin.

Since Swiss specifically mentions USB outlets in their press release, but no a single word about power outlets, we conclude the carrier continue its habit of not offering power outlets in economy class.

Bottom Line

Swiss has presented its new long-haul cabin to the world. While it looks slanky, most of the euphoria for the new design was already spent when Lufthansa introduced a very similar product earlier this week. After a closer look, things will break down to cutting First Class capacity, overwhelming customers with a bevy of business class seat options and trimming economy to be even more efficient.

The best aspect of what is basically a Lufthansa Group double feature this week, is that the cabins across Lufthansa group carriers will become much more equal by the mid-2020s. Currently, Swiss holds the edge over its German mother in almost all travel classes. Now it seems like Lufthansa will take a huge leap forward, while Swiss takes a small step backwards to see eye-to-eye in the future.

Cover Picture: © Swiss