Flying first class is becoming an increasingly rare experience as major airlines scale down or eliminate luxury cabins from their long-haul flights.
Some - such as Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Air New Zealand, and Air Canada - have dropped their first-class offerings for expanded business class cabins.
Others - such as Qantas, Air France, and British Airways - have chosen to remove first-class seating from some, but not all, of their planes, while increasing the space available for business class seats.
But for Lufthansa, the industry-wide trend has provided an opportunity to retrofit its fleet of Boeing 747-400 planes with just eight first-class seats, instead of 16 previously, and use the extra space to make the first class cabin even more luxurious in the hope of attracting wealthy Chinese passengers.
Lufthansa introduced its first retrofitted 747-400 on the Hong Kong to Frankfurt flight last week.
'The load factor in first class is always high,' said Andrew Bunn, Lufthansa's general manager for Hong Kong, South China, Taiwan and Macau. But this is achieved by offering some passengers free upgrades, while others use their air miles to obtain an upgrade, Bunn said. 'And to attract more passengers to pay a full fare we needed to offer an even greater product,' he said.