Now that United has loaded its first 787 into the schedule, Denver-Tokyo beginning March 31, you can see the seatmap for the aircraft by walking through a dummy booking on the website:
There are 36 business class seats, 63 economy plus seats (presumably rows 16-22, not highlighted on the seatmap), coach has been announced as 120 seats though the seatmap would appear to show 135 seats — presumably some of the blocked/unavailable seats aren’t. They clearly haven’t put the finishing touches on the seatmap since economy plus isn’t so-flagged.
Nine across in coach seems tight to me, considering that All Nippon and Japan Airlines are doing eight across with their 787s.
It’s notable that Denver – Tokyo is announced as the first 787 route for United, they had previously indicated they’d inaugurate the 787 on Houston – Auckland. But United claims that would no longer be viable if Southwest gets permission to fly internationally out of Houston-Hobby. That’s a silly claim of course. United doesn’t want the competition, and wants the government to keep that competition illegal. But Southwest certainly isn’t going to fly to New Zealand. Their proposed international flying won’t affect the viability of an Auckland flight. Certainly Southwest’s international flying out of Hobby won’t be a detriment to United’s domestic flights at Houston Intercontinental that would feed the Auckland flight. But as part of the posturing, and at least for now, Denver – Tokyo goes first.
Hate to break it to you, Gary, but that map is barely a representation of the seat map as it will actually exist. Back in August I posted this map “estimate” for the United 787-8 based on the announced number of seats and the cabin dimensions. Since then I’ve had a few different folks on the inside confirm that it is more or less dead on balls accurate. It’s an industry term. 😉
The only thing really off on that map I have is that the center column of BF seats will be slightly offset backwards from the other rows in BF.
Also, regarding the routes, this is the first one loaded with “788” in the GDS, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be used on IAH-AKL or IAH-LOS earlier. They’re going to have aircraft on premises for several months before this route is scheduled to actually go live, and the flight times on this mesh nearly perfectly with the LOS route.
We here in DEN don’t care who lost a flight or for what reason. We’re just thrilled to have a non-stop to Asia. 🙂
The fact that Denver just conceded $20M in cost savings to UA also helped with this decision I imagine.
When does UA receive their 2nd, 3rd, 4th 787’s?
$20M in annual cost savings, I should point out.
$100M over five years, in return for UA increasing service by 4 or 5% by 2014 I think.
@Lark – $22 million actually. WN gets $1 million/yr and F9 gets $2 million/yr also.
Putting the 787 on IAH-LOS would not endear the new United to its already irate frequent fliers.
@Nick – since when does UA management care about that? UA is going to do what is best for the bottom line.
Always happy to see Colorado beat out the Texans…. especially when it was a Texan company to start with!
Personally I could care less about whether we have a non-stop to Asia…. unless they offer us some nice promos for the launch!
Yeah would have been a good opportunity to introduce a premium economy offering.
Why would using the 787 on IAH-LOS piss people off? There are customers flying on that route, too.
Oh, and the website was updated last night with the correct seat map, showing just like I said it would.
Now just need CX direct flights out of DEN.