Avis du vol entre Frankfurt et Larnaca en classe Affaires avec Lufthansa

Hello and welcome to this review of the flight from Frankfurt-Main Airport (FRA) to Larnaca-Glafcos Clerides Airport (LCA), which I took on 19 October 2024 coming back from a family trip in China.

Unfortunately, since this trip was with my family, I did not take many pictures of the flight: this report in particular will be very image-poor, and I can only offer my apology for this.

BACKGROUND

During much of October 2024, me and my family (my parents, my siblings, and myself) went on a three week trip to China, visiting Hong Kong (2-7.10.2024), Beijing (7-13.10.2024), Xi'an (13-14.10.2024), and the Guilin area (14-18.10.2024) (the Guilin portion of the trip included an night in Guilin city proper (14-15.10.2024), and visits to Ping'an Village (15-16.10.2024) and Yangshuo (16-18.10.2024)). Although we originally planned to fly from Israel immediately to China (TLV-ZRH-HKG), and back from China immediately to Israel (HKG-MUC-TLV), we had to change our flight plans due to the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East which happened around the same time, resulting in us extending our trip to include stops in Athens (30.9-1.10.2024) and Larnaca (19.10.2024).

This was not only my first time ever in Hong Kong and China, but my first time anywhere east of Tbilisi. The trip was overall very enjoyable, though I did find the increased surveillance and police presence in Mainland China bothersome: I had to carry my passport with me, instead of leaving it at a safe in my hotel room like I'm used to do in the west (and like I indeed did in Hong Kong).

Internet censorship in Mainland China was less of a problem than I feared: my mobile data package gave me uncensored internet access, while as for Wi-Fi networks, I installed a VPN on my devices in advance. The VPN worked well overall, only having some hiccups in the afternoon.

The final flight itinerary for the trip was:

The itinerary also included high-speed trains G307 (Beijing → Xi'an) and G319 (Guilin → Hong Kong).

FROM LH797 TO LH1292

The journey from our hotel in Yangshuo back to our home in Tel Aviv was quite the odyssey, taking slightly less than 48 hours when measured door-to-door.

After taking a van from Yangshuo to Guilin, a train from Guilin to Hong Kong, and a flight from Hong Kong to Frankfurt (as detailed in the Hong Kong to Frankfurt flight report), we were still only halfway back home.

Flight LH797 from Hong Kong landed in Frankfurt very early in the morning, and was taxied to a jetbridge in the A/Z section at the far west of the airport.

Frankfurt Airport was large and confusing to navigate (a far cry from my only prior time flying to and from there, with El Al's check-in desk being located very close both to the Airport entrance and to the special secure gate for Israel-bound flights, making for a very efficient layout). We looked for a business lounge and got confused on the way - the fact I mistakenly believed Cyprus was in the Schengen Zone and told this to my family did not help, as we crossed border control into Germany only to have to cross back into the international sterile zone. However, as we had a long layover time of four hours (or so we assumed; our flight ran one hour late), this was more of an inconvenience than a true hindrance. After an hour of bumbling about, we made it to the B concourse, and went to the Business class lounge above.

THE LUFTHANSA BUSINESS CLASS LOUNGE EAST B44

Since Frankfurt, alongside Munich, is Lufthansa's hub airport, it is only natural that there would be many Lufthansa lounges there. Concourse B, where our flight departs, has two business-class lounges, one at the tip of the the eastern arm of the concourse and one at the tip of the western arm. The two lounges are mirror images of each other, taking the form of small circular "towers" at the top of the concourse; they include plentiful seating, as well as work corners, a buffet, and showers.

At the lounge, we had a second breakfast and a little birthday celebration for my mom - the cake was bought at Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong right before boarding, and survived the 13-hour trip to frankfurt intact and was quite delicious as well; sadly, we did not have the foresight to buy a second one!

I also had a shower at the lounge; however, since both my laundry bag and most of my clean clothes were in my suitcase outside of my reach, this made for a somewhat inconvenient change of clothes afterwards.

I was slightly disappointed with the foods served in the buffet - since it was morning, the foods served were mostly breakfast fare. However, since I already had breakfast on the Hong Kong-Frankfurt flight, I would have preferred to have a lunch by then.

THE FLIGHT ITSELF

Aircraft information:
D-AIEQ "Münster"
Airbus A321-271NEO
Delivered new to Lufthansa 4 April 2023; 1 year and 6 months old at the time of the flight.

This was my first (and as of the initial writing of this report, the only) time flying on that plane.

Once the departure boards started showing the exact gate our flight would depart from, we knew it was time to leave the lounge and head back down. Due to the one hour delay, we ended up having a very long and tedious wait, but we eventually made it aboard the plane by 11:40.

In the annoyingly-persistent European short-haul tradition, Business class does not use dedicated seats, only economy-class seats with the middle seat left vacant and unbookable. The seats were the usual economy class fare when it comes to their dimensions; though I fit in Economy class seats easily, the particular seats Lufthansa uses were cheap and hard, and also lacked amenities such as charging plugs and device holders.

There was no in-flight entertainment whatsoever.

This sort of hard product is barely adequate on most intra-european flights (which are one- to two-hour hops), and completely unacceptable on flights of three or more hours.

Unfortunately, this state of affairs - no distinct business class and no in-flight entertainment - is very common across many European airlines. While this is understandable in low-cost carriers, the fact that full-service airlines (such as Lufthansa, SWISS, and SAS) do so as well is a travesty, and even a few steps shy of scamming their own customers. The short-haul fleets of full-service airlines should, as a bare minimum, have a bring-your-own-screen IFE system (where you connect your smartphone or tablet to an internal Wi-Fi network without internet connection, and use it as the IFE system's screen), and larger recliners in Business class.

Lunch was served around an hour after takeoff. Lufthansa's Business Class menu for short-haul flights, called "Tasting Heimat", is based on one of four German regional cuisines (those of Lower Saxony, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Thuringia), rotating on a weekly basis. This week's menu was the Thuringian one.

For my main course, I chose the Beef Roulade. The chicken breast first course was the only one available.

The meal was excellent, and felt a bit like having two different meals in one (as both the first course and the main course were made of a meat and a starch side dish). The table presentation also made the chicken breast look like the main course and the roulade as the side course, the opposite of the positions indicated in the menu.

The landing was uneventful, and Larnaca airport itself looked far less grand and impressive than I remembered (prior to that flight, I have last been in Cyprus in 2011).

After taking our bags, and quickly depositing them at a safekeeping service, we went to have dinner at a local taverna, before returning to the airport for our final flight home.