Another Comfortable Way To Europe? If Iberia Can Resolve Their Labor Issues, Another Way to Use AAdvantage Miles For Good Seats

Each to his own, but I always look for new ways to travel in comfort with my family.  American Airlines has carried me for a number of those trips, along with United, Lufthansa, Japan Airlines and a few others.  I’m loyal to American, so I’m always happy to see another option to use my AAdvantage miles for international business travel.

I’ve always been fine with angled lie-flat seats in Business Class, but most frequent travelers hate them.  No question, I do sleep better on a completely lie-flat seat.  Who doesn’t?  And, while I’m a bit behind the curve on this announcement, I was happy to hear Iberia Airlines is rolling out a new lie-flat seat across their fleet of A330 and A340s, including eight A330s Iberia is supposed to have taken delivery of by the end of February (their website indicates they received the first new A330 a couple weeks ago).

It’s an interesting looking configuration, and I’ll be eager to use Iberia to cross the pond in the future.  Iberia is a part of the oneworld alliance and also a close partner of American, so my AAdvantage miles will work just fine on Iberia.

But, before that’s likely to happen, Iberia is going to have to resolve their labor issues.  The airline is still reporting massive amounts of cancellations.  Their website currently shows displacements through the end of next week.  The airline is phasing out thousands of jobs to try and get to profitability, and that’s lead to the massive strikes. I feel badly for the people without jobs, but the airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars last year, so something has to change.