Route: Toronto to Warsaw
Plane: B787-9
Date: 19 Dec, 2025
Price: Irrelevant, operational switch after an Air Canada flight delay would cause a missed connection in London. See “background” section below.
Comfort
The Safran Aura seats in 2-2-2 are very outdated for the 2020s. While they were cutting edge in terms of space and comfort in the 2010s, LOT is going to replace these with seats offering more privacy in coming years. Whatever they replace it with, I hope they keep the massage feature.
Apart from the lack of privacy, there’s also a lack of storage around the seat area. I don’t like opening the overhead bin for everything even if I do get a whole bin to myself. There is space for your bag under the ottoman and a small side storage for slippers and shoes, but I couldn’t work on my laptop and eat dinner at the same time.
That said, the seat is nearly two feet wide and six feet six inches long as a bed. LOT has recently upgraded its pillow and blanket offering, and they are very soft. The big plus is the wide foot area that isn’t stuffed into a cubby hole and the forward-facing arrangement that makes motion feel more natural than diagonal seats.
The tray table is very sturdy and doest bounce when I type on my laptop. However, my seat neighbour was not so lucky. The tray table comes out from a complicated folding contraption in the centre armrest and his tray table was lost deep inside the armrest. So far down that it took two flight attendants five minutes to fish it back out.
In-flight entertainment
The large 21-inch touchscreen is great to look at and placed at a slight angle below eye level to make it comfortable for viewing when in bed mode. I love watching the telly in bed, but the screen was too far to touch and the touch screen remote, while well-intentioned, was finicky to use. I ended up not watching anything.
The plane does not have in-flight wi-fi.
Food
While the hard product is a mix of Eastern Bloc “this will do” and capitalist “this won’t blow the budget” mindset, the soft product is very good.
Pre-flight service started with a cheese-cream-rye kind of canapé and a glass of champagne. The champagne flutes and canapé glass dishes were both LOT branded. Passengers are served a hot towel and tablecloth service shortly after takeoff.
For dinner, I had smoked salmon as a starter and beef tenderloin as the main. The crew were generous with alcohol and accommodated my request to have a different Polish wine with every course. Dessert came stylishly on a silver cart loaded with cakes, fruits and cheeses. It is worth flying LOT just once to experience this last-century charm.
About half the cabin skipped breakfast to put in an extra hour of sleep, but I had to get up to poo anyway, so filled the newly empty space with more food. I had some kind of cured pork, a soggy quiche and some fruit. You don’t miss anything by skipping mediocre breakfast.
Service
Boarding was weird. A staff member rounded up all the Zone 1 boarding passengers and put us in a pen delineated by stanchions and ropes. I imagine it went something like this: “Comrade gate agent, please round up all the Western capitalist pig dogs.”
With only 24 seats in business class, three washrooms and two cabin-dedicated flight attendants, service was tip top. I never had to wait for a drink refill or to use the washroom. The aisles were wide enough in this layout for a passenger to grab an item from the overhead bin and a flight attendant to pass by with a tray of food at the same time without touching each other.
LOT is well aware that their rather proletariat hard product is a decade behind competitors, so they fixed the easy part first—the service—and it did not disappoint.
Background
The direct LOT flight from Toronto to Warsaw was nearly double the price of Air Canada’s offering via London, so I booked the cheaper option. The first flight from Toronto to London was delayed by almost four hours as the aircraft had to be swapped due to a mechanical issue. This meant I would miss my connection in London.
I quickly called the Air Canada hotline for assistance, and the phone agent managed to put me on the last business class seat on the direct flight with LOT. While my original itinerary would’ve landed me at Warsaw at 2 p.m., the change meant I would arrive at 1:20 p.m. instead. I was delighted.
The LOT flight was a codeshare with Air Canada, bearing an Air Canada flight number in addition to its original LOT flight number, so I surmise that’s how Air Canada put me on the much more expensive flight at no extra cost. Also, if I had to suffer the delay, the next flight from London to Warsaw was 12 hours later, which meant Air Canada would’ve owed me at least $700 in cash compensation plus expenses for a premium cabin passenger.
The computer system might have done the math quickly and figured that the $2,000 difference to get me there on time was probably not much more than making me suffer at Heathrow. For which I am grateful.
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