Don't Count Your Seats Until You've Sat Down [United Suites]

On my return trip from visiting Egypt and Jordan, I spent many miles to upgrade myself to business class.

United Airlines has been slowly rolling out "the next generation" of business class seats. Shown below, they're like miniaturized first-class cockpits.
These seats have all sorts of bells and whistles:

• Ability to lie flat. True 180-degree seats
  
• On-Demand TV
• Menu designed by Charlie Trotter
• Output for your laptop
• Ipod Dock (you need to buy the converter)

After visiting UA's promotional website and reading blog posts about the new business class chairs, imagine my surprise when I stepped into the plane to find... just seats, no cockpits. I quickly realized that I had been bamboozled. Luckily, I was one of the first to board the plane and got to see everybody's reaction as they piled onto the plane. It was fun.

It was a look of utter surprise and disappointment. Some people looked side to side and probably wondered, is this the right plane? Am I flying back to Chicago? In our section of the cabin, the one and only thing people talked about was on the (lack of) the inquiring how they were expecting something different.

These new cockpit suites are only available on a couple routes (LHR to ORD, for example) and on select planes (21 of 91 planes have been converted).

Business class on a 7 hour flight is a lot better than economy class. But we all felt that we got the short end of the stick. My "single serving friend" had read UA's press release, visited the website, changed his route to fly through Heathrow instead of Frankfurtused a TON of miles to upgrade himself, and double checked that the plane had the new suites, just to try it out. It's an adult version of taking candy from a baby.

Too bad, so sad. I guess I'm telling you this story because I find it fascinating how important it is to manage expectations. We would've been fine with our tattered beige business class seats that couldn't even go "angled flat."

Who knows when I'll be able to fly on an international flight again, but I'll be going in with managed expectations.