Unfortunately, my gate was not one of the two attached to the Etihad First Class Lounge so I walked over to the gate with a Canadian couple who were on my flight. About a week before this flight, I had noticed that there was only one other person in the cabin with me, but by the day of the flight, the seat map had 7/9 seats filled. The couple told me that they had been offered a reasonable price to upgrade from business class so they decided to splurge for the Apartments on their way home.

I ended up paying 200,000 Etihad miles for this flight plus around $400 in taxes and fees. I transferred the points over from Capital One and wouldn’t you know it, on the day I transferred the points, Etihad had a 40% transfer bonus, but it wasn’t announced until the next day for some reason. So, I now have 80,000 Etihad miles i need to use in the next couple of years. If I waited a day, I could have used around just 140,000 Capital One points instead. Oh well.

We boarded pretty much on time and first class was called first. I took an escalator up to the upper deck jet bridge and headed to the A380 Apartments.

EY21 A380 AUH-YYZ
Scheduled: 2:20-09:00
Actual: 2:32-08:19

I turned left and found my Apartment 4A. There are nine of these seats in First Class, five on the right and four on the left with The Residence in the front part of the left side of the cabin. The seats alternate between rear and front facing and between closer to the aisle and closer to the window. I had a forward-facing seat closer to the window (as when I booked the cabin was wide open.) For my flight, The Residence was pricing around $3,000 which did not seem worth it to me as the food is the same. The main difference is the bed and private bathroom, but you’ll get a preview of what that looks like later in this review.

The Apartments have a lounging seat and then a long bench that turns into a bed. There are closing doors with some decorative holes in them so it’s not quite as private as Gamechanger. There’s a decent amount of storage in and around the seat although my carry-on would not fit in the space below the bench, so a flight attendant took it and placed it in business class. Thankfully, I had put a change of clothes in my backpack just in case.

Despite the hour, I was excited for the flight and I gladly took the offer of champagne and a cold towel. It was Stenope, priced around $150-200 a bottle. Dates and Arabic coffee were also offered prior to takeoff.

I was given an amenity kit and pajamas. I asked about the female amenity kit for my wife, but the flight attendant said they were the same. She offered me a second one, but at this point, I honestly didn’t have room in my backpack for another one. The kit came in a beautiful leather Armani bag that looked large enough to use for a tablet or small laptop. It contained ESPA amenities. I also got a code for free wifi.

One downside of the Apartments is there are no individual air vents. I had brought a portable fan with me which came in handy later in the flight.

Here are some more pictures of the seat and its functions. There’s a minibar with soft drinks next to the seat and unlike Emirates, they actually keep the drinks cold.

I decided to try and stay up a bit and have the caviar course after takeoff then try and sleep. I figured it would put me a bit closer to US east coast time as we were pushing back around 6:30pm EDT.

I went to the restroom to change into the provided pajamas. There are two on the right side. One is a bit larger and the other one has a shower so the restroom part is smaller. This was the one that has the shower.

I took a look at the menu as we taxied out. Etihad has a regular menu and then a lounge and grill concept where you can just basically pair any main dish with any sauce or side. Honestly, I just now noticed that they had Boston cream pie on the menu. I totally missed this!

We were wheels up at 2:54am local time and fairly soon some more champagne was brought around with olives, cheese and nuts. As you can guess if you’ve read the rest of this trip report, I skipped the olives.

Our route actually took us over Iraq as they had just re-opened the airspace via Iraq and Iran after the recent short war taking place in that area. I was able to watch takeoff via the cameras on my screen.

Now it’s caviar time, Etihad style. I enjoyed the caviar, but the blinis were very stale. I’ve read other reviews that said the same. It’s a shame because everything else was very nicely presented.

At this point, it was 3:30am or so UAE time and around 7:30pm EDT, but in my mind, it was bedtime. I went to the restroom while the flight attendant made up my bed. This was actually the restroom without the shower, so I grabbed a picture of it. As you can see, it’s quite large, but nothing compared to those on Qatar and Emirates.

When I returned to my Apartment, the bed was made up. You can also swivel the TV so you can view it in bed and there’s another remote by the bed as well.

I slept pretty well, but woke up after about three hours as I was hungry, having only had the caviar since my late dinner at the lounge. I decided to eat the rest of my meal then try and sleep some more.

While I ate, I watched Edge of Tomorrow, which is a great movie that I hadn’t seen since it was in theaters 10 years ago. I started with the Arabic mezze and some water to drink.

It was really kind of lame compared to the Emirates version. In fact, I would say the business class version I had on QSuites a few months ago was better than this.

I moved on to my main course, the lamb shank nandi, which actually turned out to be very good. It was served with a spicy sauce and a yogurt sauce along with bread. As you can see, when it first arrived, I was missing silverware which the flight attendant hurried to bring me when I pointed it out.

For dessert I had ice cream. I don’t remember what flavor it was (maybe strawberry?), but I enjoyed it.

After the movie finished, I went back to bed for a couple more hours and got some sleep. When I got up, I just rehydrated and drank water while I watched a show I had downloaded on my iPad.

I realized after the flight that I never checked out the lounge area which is behind First Class and shared with Business Class. There’s not a bar there like on Emirates and Qatar so I didn’t make it a priority. I expect our departure time didn’t help either.

I had requested to shower about two hours before landing, but with about three hours to go and the rest of the cabin seemingly still sleeping, I figured I would go ahead and take my shower before breakfast.

The flight attendant left to prepare the shower and came back with some news: The regular shower on the right side was not working, but because there was nobody in the Residence, I could use that shower instead. I was kind of excited to see the Residence, but also mindful that if someone had paid for that upgrade, I would have been out of luck on my shower.

I went forward and took my shower in the Residence bathroom. The water pressure seemed to be better than Emirates. It’s my understanding that Residence passengers get unlimited water, but mine was set for five minutes anyway.

On my way out, I grabbed a picture of the Residence bedroom and seating area.

After I was back in my seat, it was breakfast time. I started with fruit and pastries, then had the omelet. I also got some sort of charcoal drink that was supposed to be good for my stomach (it didn’t taste great) and an iced latte.

The breakfast was really tasty and the omelet was freshly made. At this point, we had an hour or so left in the flight and they brought around a warm towel and some chocolates. My bed was turned back into the bench.

We landed about 40 minutes early, which was OK with me as I had a reasonably tight two hour connection in Toronto that included going through immigration twice and security once.

Overall, I really enjoyed my flight in the Etihad Apartments. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to fly it again though. While the lounge in Abu Dhabi was very nice, the timing of most of the Apartments flights aren’t great, especially the long-haul ones. Leaving at 2:30am isn’t so much fun, even in First Class.

Up Next: Plaza Premium Lounge YYZ Terminal 3 US Preclearance Review

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