Emirates adds Premium Economy and new Business Class to six US routes

September 18, 2024

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Emirates is in the process of refurbishing its Boeing 777 aircraft with a new Business Class cabin and its Premium Economy cabin and we saw the first reconfigured aircraft appear on the Dubai – Geneva routes in at the end of the first week of August.

Since August, Emirates has been gradually rolling out its reconfigured 777s on several of its routes, but up until now, its transatlantic routes have missed out. Not, however, for much longer as the airline has now confirmed that it plans to bring the upgraded aircraft to six of its transatlantic routes starting in November.

The Emirates refurbished 777s

Emirates is the master of spin and self-promotion, so it has large parts of the world fooled into believing that it’s a high-end airline that offers nothing but the best across all the cabins on all its aircraft.

That, however, isn’t actually true as the Emirates Business Class cabins on its 777s have lagged behind its competitors for years (you can still get stuck with a middle seat in some Business Class cabins).

a plane with seats and windows

Fortunately, Emirates has eventually started doing something about this and what it’s doing is refitting some of its 777s with a new Business Class cabin that isn’t as embarrassingly bad as the one it offers on its 777s right now.

It’s not a revolutionary cabin, it’s not a particularly impressive cabin, and it will probably seem and feel out of date in just a few years’ time, but it’s still a big improvement on the current offering.

a row of seats in an airplane — The new Emirates 777 Business Class cabin.

a seat and a chair in a plane — The new Emirates 777 Business Class seat.

The new Business Class seat is made by Safran (the manufacturer of the Business Class seats on the Emirates A380) and the refurbished 777s are home to 38 of these seats which offer all-aisle-access courtesy of a 1-2-1 layout.

The seats are just under 21″ wide, offer 44″ of pitch (leg room) and can be turned into a lie-flat bed measuring ~79″.

As I said, this a big improvement on what these seats are replacing, but it’s not much different to some seats that other airlines have been offering for years (e.g. Etihad’s Business Studio seat).

At the same time as getting a Business Class makeover, these Emirates 777s are also being fitted with the airline’s new (and first ever) Premium Economy cabin which looks like this:

a row of seats in an airplane

Set out in a 2-4-2 layout, the 24 Recaro PL3530 seats are 19.5″ wide and offer 40″ of pitch (leg room) and 8″ of recline.

Each seat features an adjustable headrest, a calf rest, a footrest and a retractable bi-folding table as well as a 13.3″ HD touch screen display, USB-A/USB-C ports and a universal AC power outlet.

This is a Premium Economy cabin with seats that offer more width and more legroom than any of the usual transatlantic carriers (Delta, United, American, BA, Virgin, etc…) and that makes it comparatively more impressive than the product Emirates has fitted in Business Class.

This Premium Economy cabin is already available on select flights to/from the US where Emirates operates the A380 (e.g. Los Angeles), but the new Business Class cabin will be making its US debut when it arrives later this year.

Emirates upgrades 6 US routes

This is what we’re told the rollout of the refurbished aircraft onto the airline’s US routes will look like:

Chicago

The refitted 777 will appear on the Dubai – Chicago route 3x/week from 1 November 2024 as EK235/236 and will operate a daily service on this route from 22 November 2024.