Singapore Airlines has brought its new first-class Suites to the US as the airline relaunched its double-decker Airbus A380 aircraft on its daily route from New York to Singapore with a stopover in Frankfurt, Germany. The reconfigured Airbus A380 boasts of six ultra-spacious first-class suites, each of which offers separate recliner seats and beds as well as a sliding door for privacy.
In addition, flyers traveling together can purchase adjoining suites and combine them, and in so doing turn their single bed into a shared twin.
Other upscale features of the first-class suites include a wardrobe closet, a handbag stowage compartment, a 32-inch entertainment screen and automatic window shades, which can be closed in a blackout mode or closed in an intermediate setting that allows some light through.
An article in Travel Weekly quoted Singapore Airlines spokesman James Boyd saying that the design of the suites was created to slowly reveal itself over the course of the flight.
“We can take something that’s really basic, such as a magazine rack, and we can turn it into a luxury statement. If you look at the stitching on the magazine rack, it was actually inspired by a Hermes Berkin bag, for example,” Boyd. “Or creating a cultured stone to go on top of the credenza — little moments of luxury, little moments of surprise. Like when you open a stowage compartment and it’s lined with leather and quilted, or it has a cove light in it that slowly illuminates as you open the door and slowly dims.”
In addition to the six suites, the plane is equipped with 78 lie-flat business-class seats, 44 premium economy seats and 343 economy seats. Until the launch, Singapore Airlines had been flying the JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore route with an Airbus A350 or a Boeing 777 since resuming the route in November following a 20-month Covid hiatus.
The new first-class suites, which measure 50 square feet and can be conjoined to make a 100-square-foot space, are double the size of the 12 first-class spaces the airline offered on the A380 it flew on JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore prior to the pandemic. Tickets cost between $8,000 and $12,000 one-way.
Along with using a larger aircraft on its JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore service, the carrier added a new daily nonstop flight to Singapore from Newark on Monday. Those two additions, together with Singapore’s daily nonstop Airbus A350 service out of JFK, now have the airline flying well in excess of its pre-pandemic capacity from the New York area.
