Hello from the United States, as I just flew Philippine Airlines’ brand new Airbus A350-1000 business class on the 11hr55min flight from Manila (MNL) to San Francisco (SFO). As I’ve already covered, my journey up until this point wasn’t particularly great, between the carrier’s rough A330 business class , and the bad Manila ground experience (sorry for sharing my experience, Darryl — it’s obviously my fault that this experience on the Delta of the Pacific has fallen short of a Skytrax 6-star journey!).

The A350-1000 is supposed to represent the new generation for Philippine Airlines, so how did the experience go? Let me share some initial thoughts, and soon I’ll have a full review.

I’m going to use a different format here than normal, so feel free to share your feedback. Basically, I feel like my initial thoughts posts have been getting too long in recent times, so I need to differentiate them a bit more from the actual reviews. Also, the internet’s attention span keeps getting shorter.

Philippine Airlines’ new A350 business class represents a massive step up over the carrier’s old product. Here’s what I enjoyed about the experience:

While there was a lot I enjoyed about Philippine Airlines’ A350 business class, there were also some areas for improvement:

Philippine Airlines’ new A350-1000 business class is a massive improvement over the carrier’s old product. Given Philippine Airlines’ competitive pricing, I’d absolutely fly with the airline again, if the price or schedule were right (though transiting Manila… ugh).

However, this definitely still isn’t quite a first tier airline in terms of the overall experience, especially when you consider the competition in Asia. But hey, value has to be factored in, so that’s fair enough.

Also, neither good nor bad, but I do have to mention this — the song that’s blasted in the cabin the second Philippine Airlines planes touch down is… a choice.