Flying in ANA’s ‘The Room’ Business Class

I am a total stranger when it comes to flying in business class, especially for long-haul flights. This is why I was especially excited to try out ANA’s “The Room” business class flight on my return flight from Japan! I felt really fortunate that the timing worked out and that I had enough credit card points to book these flights!

Booking our flights

We booked our ANA flights through the United Airlines website since I was able to convert my credit card points to United miles.

ANA flights show up on the search results alongside other Star Alliance flights, so we just had to check that we were purchasing ANA flights. ANA currently has two different business class offerings, the previous product and the new product which is what’s known as “The Room”. Through the United search results you can’t see which flights are the ones that offer “The Room” until you’re choosing your seats, which you can then determine based on the seatmap that’s rendered.

But if you want to be sure that the flight you’re choosing does have The Room, you’ll need to cross reference the flight with its corresponding result on the actual ANA website.

To do this, I looked up the flight number and departure date and time I was looking at on the United website on the ANA website and checked to make sure that the search results showed the “THE Room” tag on it like below. I also verified that the seatmap looked like the “New 212 Seats” seatmap also shown on the ANA website.

It is important to note that even if you book a flight with The Room intentionally, situations may change on the day such that the flight could get changed to a different airplane, so there’s still technically no guarantee unfortunately. But hopefully everything goes according to plan, and you end up getting what you reserved!

Prior to this flight, I had never flown on any of ANA’s business class flights before, so I’m sure that even the older product is a great experience. I’ve only seen from online resources what the old and new products are like and based on those, the older business class seats are smaller and in general it seems like most people want to experience The Room (understandably so).

ANA Lounge

We flew out of Haneda airport and prior to our flight we were able to use the ANA lounge, which is available for guests flying premium economy class and higher. First class flyers have an even more exclusive lounge that they can use also.

The ANA lounge that we had access to was quite busy, but we were still able to find some seating. There are some self-serve snacks and hot foods to choose from like onigiri and karaage. To order bowls of noodles, they have a QR code so guests can order from their phone and pick up at pick-up window when the order is ready.

The lounge also has showers, but this was super busy when we visited, so if you’re interested in taking a shower, definitely sign up for the waitlist as soon as possible. We somehow still got to both eke in a shower but literally did so around 5-10 minutes before we had to leave to board our flight.

The Flight

The Seats

The seats in The Room are the thing that makes this experience so mindblowing! The seats are HUGE. They’re so wide, two of me could fit in a single seat and I’d still have extra room!

The TV screen is also very large, probably the biggest screen I’ve ever seen on an airplane.

The room also has a small cabinet to store some small items, a spacious footwell, and several reading lights behind and in front of the seat.

The coolest part of the room is the sliding doors that, when closed, literally enclose you into a whole room. There’s a large4 sliding door that goes up and down between you and the seat beside you (for seats in the center). On the side facing the aisle there are two sliding panels that close the walking area in addition to a window-like area.

The chair slides down into a horizontal bed and is so spacious when lying down.

Amenity Kit

We received a small ETTINGER amenity kit at our seats in the form of a storage pouch with a lotion and lip balm inside of it.

The Menu

Snacks / Light Bites

During the flight, we could order as many snack dishes as we wanted. We wanted to try everything on the menu, but honestly it was so much food, we couldn’t get through it all before landing. But here’s what we did try!

Snack 1: Nut bar with a side salad

This was a nice first snack! The nut bars were very nutty but also had a ginger space to them which was nice as well. The small salad was refreshing and light.

Snack 2: Shrimp sandwich

This sandwich was okay, but I’m not a huge fan of cold sandwiches, so it wasn’t my favorite.

Snack 3: Ippudo ramen

This was probably my favorite dish of the whole flight (including the main meal). The ramen broth had so much flavor and the noodles were delicious. Even better yet, this dish was vegan, so it’s enjoyable, for anyone!

Snack 4: Corn soup

The corn soup was quite watery, so it wasn’t the best corn soup. But it had a nice sweet corn flavor to it and was still tasty.

Snack 5: Kitsune udon

The udon noodles and the tofu both had a great texture. The soup was a little on the bland side.

Snack 6: Onigiri

The onigiri was nice and warm and the rice texture was really good! It also had a very nice flavor to it. Unfortunately I was already so full, and rice is especially filling so I enjoyed it less than I might have if I was really hungry.

Snack 7: Cookies & cream ice cream

I love cookies & cream flavor and Haagen-dazs ice cream, so this was delicious!

Main Meal

Our flight had one main meal that we were served when we were closer to landing. For this main mean, we were offered the choice between a Western meal and a Japanese meal.

I got the Japanese meal which was a fish with rice and sides of various small dishes, fruit, and soup. The fish was flavorful, but the side dishes were a bit strange to me.

The Service

Everyone on board was really and very efficient. They did feel a bit curt to me, so I felt like I was often being troublesome when asking for something. I know their primary job is to keep all passengers on board safe and that everything else is secondary, so I didn’t want to be too annoying. But I was also just so excited to be there and curious to try everything that I wanted to get the most out of my experience.

Overall Experience

Overall, the experience was incredible! The size of the seats were just so wild to me, I couldn’t believe we had that much room on a flight. It was definitely one of the most comfortable flying experiences I’ve ever had, and I had so much fun just being there!

I enjoyed trying all the different foods on the flight, and I really liked that they were mostly Japanese food items.

One thing that I thought was especially cool about the flight that I hadn’t experienced before was that they actually had a channel where you could see the outside of the airplane from the front and the bottom! So we could see exactly what it looks like when the plane takes off and lands, and we could see the sky and the ocean all from our seat!

The Room seating is truly unbelievable, and I’m just so grateful to have had this experience! I think something I’d definitely like to try in the future (with some luck and lots of points!) would be The Suite First Class on an ANA flight!