Finnair

Finnair has confirmed that it plans to add more flights to a number of its international destinations in 2025 and four of those destinations are cities in the United States. Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle will all be getting more flights from Helsinki than were originally scheduled as the airline looks to feed more passengers into the American Airlines domestic network.

Towards the beginning of the year, Finnair surprised quite a few people when it unveiled a new and very different Business Class seat alongside its long rumored Premium Economy Cabin. Since then, we've seen the new cabins appearing on select routes to Asia as well as on a couple of Finnair's US routes, and now they're coming to Miami. 

Back in February, Finnair surprised the world when it unveiled a new (and different) Business Class seat alongside a new Premium Economy Cabin. At the time, it was thought that until a significant number of Finnair's long-haul aircraft had been retrofitted with the new cabins, the new seats would be limited to the airline's Asia routes but as it turns out, that's not going to be the case.

Earlier today I wrote about Finnair revealing an entirely new Business Class cabin but, arguably, the bigger news of the day was that Finnair has also said that it will be fitting a Premium Economy cabin to all of its long-haul aircraft for the first time in its history.

Finnair has been teasing this for weeks, but today the teasing ended and the airline finally unveiled its new Business Class cabin, a reworked Economy Class cabin, and announced that it will be introducing a long-haul Premium Economy cabin for the first time in its history. This post will look a the new Business Class cabin while subsequent posts will explore the new Economy and Premium Economy cabins. 

As far as its US network is concerned, it has been a big six months for Finnair. In July it announced a new service between Stockholm and Miami, in September it announced new routes from Stockholm to Los Angeles and New York, and in November it announced a new route between Helsinki and Dallas Fort Worth that's set to launch in February 2022. Now the airline has gone a step further and announced yet another new US Route which will launch in summer 2022.

Following on from its July announcement of new routes from Stockholm to Bangkok, Phuket, and Miami, Finnair has now confirmed that it plans to launch two more US routes out of the Swedish capital and that it plans to turn what has traditionally been a transatlantic summer route into a route that's operated year-round.

Finnair has announced that it plans to base three of its Airbus A350 aircraft at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport this coming winter season and use them to operate three new 7th freedom flights. Two of these flights will be heading to Asia while the third will be crossing the Atlantic to the United States.

For the past few days, things have been looking pretty gloomy on the Finnair Business Class fares front, but a little bit of digging has revealed that the news may not be quite as bad as we thought. In fact, the news could have been a lot worse.

Yesterday, I got an email from British Airways to let me know that my Finnair flight from Helsinki to Los Angeles (booked for a few months' time has been cancelled) so I thought I'd write a quick post setting out how I plan to tackle this minor set back in the hope that it may give less experienced travelers an idea of how to approach any similar situations they may encounter.

Finnair has announced that it will be adding two new routes to its winter schedule for 2019/20 and, although the frequencies on the routes aren't exactly impressive, the fact that this is an airline known for the occasional great deal means that they should prove popular with oneworld flyers.

You only have to look back a little over a decade to see a time when most transatlantic airlines didn't offer a Premium Economy cabin and when the likes of British Airways and Virgin Atlantic offered a product that few others did. Air France and KLM added Premium Economy cabins in 2009 but things didn't start to speed up in the sector until 2014 when Lufthansa joined the Premium Economy club. Since then we've seen American Airlines, Iberia, Delta, LOT and United Airlines(amongst others) jump on the Premium Economy bandwagon. Now it's Finnair's turn.

Finnair flies its excellent Airbus A350 between London Heathrow and Helsinki on a daily basis but, as luck would have it, the A350's schedule wouldn't get me into Helsinki in time to connect on to my Qatar Airways flight to Doha so I was stuck with a narrow-body A319. I don't normally book myself into short-haul Business Class (either with miles or points) as I don't generally see the value in paying considerably more for a cabin that differs only slightly from Economy Class. On this occasion, however, I had chosen to overpay for my flight and book the frontmost cabin as the math behind the tier points I'm earning this year showed that it was the right thing to do.

In news that's sure to be welcomed by oneworld flyers, Finnair has announced that it intends to operate a seasonal route between Helsinki and San Francisco from summer 2017. The Scandinavian airline plans to employ its Airbus A330-300 aircraft on the new route which will operate 3x/week.

Back on 15 October I took a quick day-trip to Helsinki to try out the latest Finnair aircraft - an Airbus A350XWB - which was still flying "crew orientation" flights around Europe. The Finnair Airbus A350XWB is fitted with two exterior cameras - one on the underside of the aircraft and one on/around the tail - and the cool thing is that you can watch the feeds from these cameras on the personal TV screen at your seat. This is a video of what I could see on my TV screen as we came in to land at London Heathrow Airport - I haven't edited the sound or picture in any way so the noise and the shake are very real! :)

In Part 1 of this review I took a look a the pre-boarding/boarding experience with Finnair and the cabins & seats on the Airbus A350XWB. In this part of the review I'll take look at the rest of the offering onboard from the entertainment and WiFi to the food and service offered.

This was the big event and the whole point of my lightning trip to Helsinki. The Finnair A350XWB wasn't anywhere to be seen when I landed at Helsinki Airport and there was good reason for that....it was en route from Munich on another of its "crew familiarisation" trips.

I’m starting to find myself flying on Finnair a lot more nowadays. They’re a member of the OneWorld Alliance which means that I can credit my flights on Finnair to my American Airlines AAdvantage account. That, in turn, means that I earn AAdvantage miles as well as miles towards American Airlines status which I value quite highly.