For someone my age, I would say I am a reasonably well-travelled person, and thus I feel mildly qualified to comment on Swiss’ Business Class and provide *hopefully* an objective review of their Business class service.

Swiss International Airlines recently cancelled their SIN-ZRH service, so unfortunately for most of my audience you’ll find it more difficult to get to try their service out. Having said that, I think if you get a chance to try it out, you definitely should! Why? Because I think that although Swiss is the subsidiary airline of German giant, Lufthansa, their service has a more personal and unique touch than that offered by Lufthansa, and more importantly, the service was quite attentive. Don’t get me wrong. I think Lufthansa is quite good, though their long haul services are not all yet outfitted with personal screens in Economy, other than this *to me* rather Major issue, they have pretty good in flight service that is a marvel of Germanic efficiency, and unfortunately though, sameness.

Swiss offers a differentiated product that is somehow more warm, and I definitely felt more at ease with the flight attendants than I did on previous flights with Lufthansa. Now, is their service better than Singapore Airlines’? Yes and No.  Whether you’re Asian or otherwise. Although  a criticism often levelled at Singapore Air’s flight attendants, is that they treat Westerners better than Asians, I believe that the only way around it is to be nice to the flight attendants (FAs). But the thing is, I don’t want to have to be proactively nice to you before you’re nice to me, something which did not happen on the Swiss flight.

Pics of Meal Service after the break

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airplane food, business class, Flight attendants, Food, IFE, lufthansa, Review, Singapore Airlines, Star Alliance, swiss

For those of you out there who follow me on Twitter, you’ll have been more than aware of my travails around the world, you’ll also have found out that I recently got bumped up to Business Class by Swiss on a flight from ZHR-PVG. (Zurich Kloten International Airport – Pudong International Airport). In this blogpost, I plan to help you get an upgrade for your next flight. Feel free to comment, and add your own tips as well.

1st and foremost among my tips is: Don’t expect it. It’s nearly impossible nowadays to get upgraded, on any airline. But here are some things I did/had which made me a good candidate for upgrade.

1) Travel on overbooked flights. This was for me a PURELY lucky coincidence, because I had booked by ticket way ahead, and it was also a ridiculously cheap fare of only £313.

2) I travelled alone. When you’re travelling in a group, or on a ticket with a few people, it almost automatically eliminates your chances of getting upgraded as they’re not gonna just upgrade ONE out of say a family of four people.

3) I was a Star Alliance Silver Member. Having membership does have its privileges and here for the first time, Silver membership finally gave me some form of reward.

4) Check in early, Online if possible. If you’re the first in the queue, they know you’re coming so they feel more comfortable about giving you the upgrade.

5) Dress nicely. *though I didn’t do this, because they’d already given me the upgrade way before hand* My Dad and Mom used to get upgrades all the time on Singapore Airlines and one of the things they would do is roll out from behind their tall desk at the check in counter to look at you and make sure you’re not wearing jeans and slippers or something.

Some of these factors are PURE luck. And you may or may not EVER get as lucky as I did. So GOOD LUCK! At worst just show up in a wheel chair or something

business class, kloten international airport, pudong, PVG, shanghai, Singapore Airlines, Star Alliance, swiss, Travel, upgrades, ZHR, zurich