Continental BusinessFirst... a comparison against AA and others

This month, I had a chance to fly on Continental, which is not one of my regular picks... I had a last minute trip to GRU, and more or less was priced out of flying on DL, UA, and AA by a pretty wide margin. Knowing budgets were tight because it was the end of the yea, I decided to take one for the team and go cheap...

Domestically, CO's business class is pretty good.  Meals and service levels were on par with what I'd experienced with UA and AA, as was the seat.  The only serious downside was the lack of seat power.  I'm spoiled by AA in this regard (especially now that they're putting "normal" 110v plugs on the new 737s, instead of the 12V cigarette plugs found on all the rest of their domestic fleet).  On a two hour flight, I didn't need it, but on a longer haul or if I had a short connection, it would become a significant downer, at least to me...

Internationally, CO's business class pales in comparison.  On the positive, the menu was as good as I've had with AA in the past year, and CO gets high marks for their flight attendants.  Totally different vibe than I've seen on AA or other North American carriers in a long time, and that was from all four crews I came in contact with.  And they did offer seat power, but unfortunately it was the 4-pin Empower 12V plug, which I no longer carry.  At least with AA's 12V plug, I can use the inverter from my Jeep.  No such luck with the 12V Empower jack.

On the downside...

CO's seating on the 762 is the pits.  I felt like I was sitting in a Laz-Y-Boy recliner.  Seatback reclined only about 50 degrees, and the legrest was pretty useless for someone of my height.  I never thought I'd find something worse than IB and AA's not-quite-flat seats, but I did.  But it gets better:  when the person in front of me reclined their seat, it actually came in contact with my tray table as I was eating.  There's nothing grosser than having the back of someone else's head about 6" from your food.

Entertainment options were also a step into a time machine.  Unlike other airlines who have moved to "on-demand" programming, CO is still using looping tape technology.  That means 24 options on a 2.5hr cycle.  Don't like your movie, or miss the beginning of a movie you wanted to see?  You get to wait until the 2.5hr cycle restarts.  That means on a 10 hour flight, you will see a maximum of three movies, regardless of their length...  By comparison, I've seen as many as five on a 9 hour flight when flying IB...

While things like service and menu will always be seen differently by different people, flaws like those in CO's hard product are much harder to overcome.  Good service won't negate an uncomfortable seat.  A good meal doesn't offset the remaining 8 hours of a flight.

Conclusion.... I'd probably try CO again for a short flight, but not for anything over three hours.  How this gets addressed in the UA/CO merger is yet to be seen, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope for it changing before the end of 2011.