France 2014: Flight to France

We chose Air France to fly to Paris for our trip because we like the food and service on this airline more than Air Canada. With our platinum level LoveHomeSwap membership, we qualified for free lounge passes in the Air France lounge at Pearson Airport. What an extremely civilized way to wait for a flight–nice comfy seats, newspapers and magazines to peruse, tons of food including hot hors d'oeuvres, sandwiches, soup, salads and desserts, and alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks.

For our long-awaited trip to celebrate our retirement, we decided to splurge on the overnight flight out to Paris by upgrading to "premium economy seats–one level up from economy. From what I recall, I think the one-way ticket price was about $150+ more for the upgrade.  For that price, we got wider seats with more leg room which made it a much more comfortable ride for Rich.  There are only three rows of seats in the premium economy section (configured as 2, 4, 2).  As it turns out, we were assigned the first row, which gave us even more leg room.  I was actually able to stretch my legs completely in order to try to sleep on the red-eye flight.  This was good since the foot rest provided was too small even for my short little legs and left them dangling.  Apparently, Air France is redesigning and upgrading all of their premium economy sections but unfortunately we did not get one of those retrofitted planes.

In this section, you get a special menu as well.  Ours included a fois gras salad, medallions of chicken with rice and vegetables in a Middle-Eastern sauce, cheese, apple sauce and a delicious chocolate "Opera" cake.  We would like to try premium economy again on an upgraded plane so that we can compare.  Our flight back did not have a premium economy section, so we will be back to reality,  smushed in with the plebes.