Edelweiss

Edelweiss is Switzerland's holiday airline, the leisure sister to SWISS inside the Lufthansa Group, flying from Zurich to the places Swiss travellers actually go on holiday: the Mediterranean and the Canaries on the narrowbodies, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and North America on the widebodies. The flag carrier keeps the business routes; Edelweiss gets the beaches and flies them with more polish than the leisure label suggests.

The fleet splits cleanly in two. A320-family jets cover the short haul in a single economy cabin, while the long haul belongs to two very different aircraft: the A340-300, a four-engine veteran with a lie-flat staggered business class, and the A350-900, the newer flagship steadily taking over the long routes. One A350 cabin has already been rebuilt around all-aisle business seating and the first premium economy Edelweiss has published on any aircraft.

The A320 and A320neo fly as one economy cabin front to back. On some services Edelweiss sells a business fare over the front rows, but the hardware never changes: it is the same seat with the middle kept free, so the seat map shows the cabin as what it physically is. One A320 flies a slightly denser fit with no front zone at all.

The A340-300 carries the classic Edelweiss long-haul cabin, in two closely related fits: a staggered flat-bed business class where most seats are solo thrones by the windows, a two-by-four-by-two economy behind it and, unusually, a band of economy ahead of it in the nose. The A350-900 comes in two forms as well. The current cabin pairs a flat-bed business in two-by-two-by-two pairs with a three-by-three-by-three economy; the rebuilt version moves business to a one-by-two-by-one layout where every seat reaches the aisle directly, and slots a two-by-three-by-two premium economy behind it.

Long-haul business is where this fleet rewards attention. The A340's staggered cabin gives solo travellers real privacy at the windows; the current A350 cabin is a flat bed in pairs, where the window sleeper climbs past a neighbour to reach the aisle; the rebuilt A350 removes that compromise altogether. All of them lie flat, so the choice between them is about privacy and aisle access rather than sleep.

Economy changes character between types. The A340's eight-abreast layout gives window couples a pair to themselves, while the A350 runs the tighter, more modern nine-abreast with the quieter cabin and bigger windows of the newer airframe. The rebuilt A350's premium economy adds a middle option: a wider seat with more pitch, well short of business and clearly ahead of the main cabin. Short-haul is a tidy single-class product built for two-to-four-hour hops to the sun.

Match the seat to the aircraft on the widebodies. Solo travellers should chase the A340's throne seats, which put a console between the seat and the aisle; couples do better in that cabin's paired seats or anywhere in the current A350's business pairs. In A340 economy the window pairs are the pick, and the small economy section in the nose is off the aircraft ahead of everyone behind the curtain.

On the A320s the legroom lives at the over-wing exits, the row ahead of them loses recline, and the final rows sit closest to the rear galley and the lavatory queue. If the A350 is the aircraft on your booking, find out which cabin it carries before paying for anything, because business, premium economy and the economy density all change between the two versions.