Overall review: Air France business class on the 777-300ER was really enjoyable, with great food, a comfortable seat, solid entertainment, and good service. It felt like such a treat! It’s one of the best options to get to Europe in a pretty darn nice business class for relatively few miles and taxes/fees from the West Coast, and I am definitely planning to book award flights to fly Air France business again. Another great reason to love this option: you can regularly find availability for families of 4+, even in business class!

If you want to learn how to book this same kind of flight for your family, scroll down to “How you can book a flight like this for your family” below!

How much I paid for this flight: 68,000 Flying Blue miles and $167.40 in taxes and fees per person, for a total of 272,000 miles and $669.60 for all four of us. Note: You can get an even better deal now! Flying Blue has lowered the cost of business-class award tickets to 50,000 miles (when you can find saver availability), which is a STEAL. When we booked this trip, they hadn’t lowered the costs yet, so that option wasn’t available to us. Also, our dates weren’t flexible at all because this was during a school break, so we were happy with paying 68,000 miles per person. I still think that’s a good deal, TBH. And if your kids are age 2-11, you can pay 25% fewer points for their tickets because Air France gives a child discount on award flights. Like I said, this is an incredible deal for families!

How I earned the miles: I honestly don’t even remember which bank’s program we transferred our miles from; it may have been a transfer from a couple of different cards into one Flying Blue account. You can transfer points from Chase, Citi, AmEx, and Capital One to Air France/KLM’s Flying Blue program and book award flights online very easily. Transfers are usually instant, and if you transfer during a transfer bonus, you can maximize your value even more. For example, if one of the major banks has a 30% transfer bonus, you can get a 50,000-mile business-class award ticket by just transferring 39,000 bank points to Flying Blue. The 30% bonus would transform 39,000 bank points into 50,700 Flying Blue miles.

Flying Blue is absolutely one of the easiest and best-value programs to transfer to for flying to Europe in business class from the US or Canada, and even more so for families!

All about the flight

The seats

Our flight was on a Boeing 777-350ER, so once I figured that out, I went to Aerolopa.com and we picked our seats to have the four of us sitting clustered together on the same aisle, so we could get to the kids if needed without having to cross to the other side of the plane. It worked well, and the kids were happy because we gave them both the window seats. In return, we got some great photos from my son of the view as we flew over the Rockies:

The aircraft layout on our flight included 4 seats in La Première (ultra-luxurious first class) and 58 seats in business class spread over two cabins. We wanted to be in the smaller of the two business-class cabins so it didn’t feel as crowded, so we went with seats 4F, 4L, 5F, and 5L.

As you can tell from the layout diagram above, all seats in business class on the 777-350ER had direct-aisle access.

There is a removable divider between the E and F seats in each row, but the divider doesn’t go 100% of the way between the seats; there is a small area near the seatback screens that is still open, although that is basically mostly blocked off when you pull out the screen at a comfortable viewing angle. My husband, sitting in 4F, had an interesting view of his 4E seatmate’s side through that small un-divided area for a few minutes (until he finally covered up his feet):

If you’re traveling as a couple and want to be able to easily talk with your travel partner during the flight, I’d recommend the E and F seats in the same row. Your flight attendant will be able to remove the divider between you.

The business-class product on our flight was not the newest Air France offers, but it was still pretty amazing and very comfortable. (The new business class offers sliding doors at each seat for maximum privacy, a wireless-charging counter/tabletop, and a USB-C port.)

Our seats offered a regular universal outlet, a USB-A port, a reading light, a screen/seat controller, a set of noise-canceling headphones, a storage cubby (with mirror), and a nice-sized footwell big enough to store my travel tote bag underneath. Each seat also came with a blanket, pillow, hanger (for coats, to be handed to a flight attendant to be hung in the cabin’s closet), a bottle of water, and the flight menu.

Once we had settled into our seats, the flight attendants came around offering pre-departure champagne or orange juice; I picked champagne. And then a few minutes later, we were each given amenity kits in the cutest herringbone-patterned zipper bags. Each amenity kit had a toothbrush, toothpaste, two different Clarins face lotions/creams, earplugs, an eye mask, a pen, and socks.

The food

We received printed menus outlining the flight’s food and beverage options.

Because our flight left in the late afternoon, the main meal was called “lunch,” but it was essentially dinner. Six courses!

There were also snacks available during the overnight portion of the flight, including fresh fruit that actually looked great: beautiful strawberries artfully arranged, for example. No sketchy-looking red delicious apples here! I wish I had taken a photo of the pretty snack display set up between the business-class cabins, but the cabins were dark and it would have been intrusive and weird to take a photo with flash then, so I didn’t.

The wine and champagne that I tried from this menu were delicious. I had the champagne before takeoff, the white burgundy during my meal, and an armagnac as a digestif after the meal.

I completely forgot they even offered espresso and cappuccino by the time we got to breakfast, which I was kicking myself for, because boy did I need it.

The appetizer course was good! (And I got a chuckle out of spotting Rob Delaney in the latest Mission: Impossible movie. Did not realize he was in that.)

I had a little laugh at the alphabetization of the movies on the in-flight entertainment system. Past Lives, what are you doing there before the “O” movies?!

The food was all really good, as you’d expect from a chef-designed six-course menu from Air France. No complaints here!

Alas, I have no photo of the opera cake because I apparently can’t be bothered to stop and take a photo before diving into delicious chocolate cake. Which is very on-brand for me. Trust me, it was good.

The whole dinner service ended up taking about two hours, and then I used the seat-control buttons to lower my seat into the sleeping/bed position and made it up using the provided blanket and pillow.

I felt like this bed arrangement was great on space but could have used some nicer blanket options. The blanket provided was fine, but it wasn’t as nice as we’ve seen on Singapore or United Polaris.

I managed to get maybe a couple of hours of not-great sleep stitched together over the whole course of the flight, which wasn’t what I had hoped for. Not sure why I couldn’t sleep, but that’s on me, not Air France. (Probably because it was the equivalent of 6pm to me, Pacific Time? Just a guess.)

When I woke up, it was to the noises of the flight attendants serving breakfast.

Other flight notes I don’t have photos for:

• The reason we booked this flight from LAX instead of Seattle is simple: the business-class seats for four weren’t available for the date we needed from Seattle, and our date wasn’t flexible because the trip was during a one-week school break. So we got a cheap positioning flight to LAX.
• The lavatories were normal-sized airplane lavatories (no extra-large lavatories like in some other airlines’ premium cabins), and there were Clarins-branded soaps and toiletries in them. They were kept pretty clean throughout the flight, which was great. No complaints.
• One thing that was kind of weird on our flight was that there was a parent who was seated in La Première who apparently had two kids flying in a cabin in the back of the plane, and there were several times during the flight when a flight attendant had to shepherd the kids to and from the parent in first, which was unusual and felt kind of disruptive. I didn’t think airlines permitted kids that young (maybe ages 7 and 9?) to fly unaccompanied like that when there’s literally a parent on the plane who just doesn’t feel like traveling in a lower-class cabin? The whole situation was odd. I felt bad for the kids, being paraded through the plane like they were. But I’m guessing if you’re flying in La Première, Air France will bend over backwards to fulfill any requests you have. C’est la vie.

I’ll have another post soon about the Air France business-class lounge we got to go in at CDG, and our business-class flight from Paris to Rome.

How you can book a flight like this for your family

The great thing about Air France business class is that it’s one of the easiest award tickets to earn miles for, and it’s also one of the easiest to book for multiple people traveling together! The taxes/fees on a business-class ticket are also a lot lower than some of the alternatives (Virgin Atlantic and British Airways, I’m looking at you).

Any of the points currencies from the four major banks all transfer to the Flying Blue program, so you can earn whatever type of transferable points you want to and then combine them into one Flying Blue account. Remember that the name on the banks’ points accounts and the name on the Flying Blue account need to be the same in order to transfer them; if you’re trying to use points from two people’s balances into one itinerary to book everyone’s tickets at once, you’ll need to transfer them to/from each other BEFORE you transfer to Flying Blue. For example, if I had a bunch of Capital One points I wanted to transfer to a Flying Blue account to book tickets, I couldn’t transfer my Capital One points to my spouse’s Flying Blue account; I’d need to transfer my points to his Capital One account first, and then he could use those points to book using his Flying Blue account.

If you’re trying to book a round trip with Flying Blue for both legs, you could also have one person book all the one-way flights on the outbound leg, and then have the other person book all the one-way flights on the inbound leg.

The Air France award calendar can be a little glitchy sometimes, but it’s usually pretty easy to work with. When you’re doing your search if you want to see a month-long calendar of all the dates with low award fares, be sure to not type in any specific dates on the first page of your search.

Just looking now at what’s available for 50,000 points for four people or more, I happened to see a lot of availability from Houston to Paris in January and February 2025, as an example. Look at all those dates when it’s just 200k points for four people to fly nonstop to Paris in super-nice business class! Miles and points are amazing sometimes, right??

I see lots of availability for Los Angeles and Chicago for January and February, too. Check out your home airport to see if you have any 50,000-point-per-person business class award availability. It’s a great value and really perfect for family premium-cabin award travel. And remember, if you transfer points to Flying Blue when there’s a transfer bonus, you can maximize your redemption even more!