Some airlines around the world cover chauffeur service to and from the airport for business and first class passengers. One of the best used to be Etihad, which – in order to compete against Emirates based an hour away in Dubai – offered to take you anywhere in the U.A.E. when you arrived. They’d drive you to Dubai or Sharjah, and pick you back up there as well. And this even used to be available to passengers traveling on award tickets.
Other airlines will offer tarmac transfers from the lounge to the plane and back. Air France does this for La Premiere at Paris Charles de Gaulle. Once clearing dedicated passport control, you drive from Lufthansa’s first class terminal to the plane. After all, you’re in a different terminal from everyone else that’s boarding the aircraft!
Even United, Delta, and American have tarmac transfers as a surprise and delight for their best customers making very tight connections.
Emirates will do in-home check-in where they come to you to issue boarding passes and collect your checked bags.
Lufthansa is working on something that combines all of these: limousine pickup at home, and driving straight to the aircraft. You’ll skip all of the formalities of the airport entirely if this comes to fruition for HON Circle and first class customers.
[A]ccording to a Lufthansa spokesperson, the details are still being examined and “no decision has yet been made,” the board has announced a promising test phase. As part of a new service, First Class passengers and those with HON Circle status will be picked up from their homes or offices in a limousine and taken directly to their flight. There is no time spent in the terminal and the guests are brought back again after landing.
It’s not clear how this will work in practice, especially with passport control. It seems like you’d need to a make a stop in the car, at least, at the First Class Terminal’s passport control in Frankfurt for immigration formalities (that they wouldn’t be able to arrange this in the vehicle). The same goes for security screening.
And it will be also interesting to see how they time traffic to and from the airport. If they’re setting this up to take you straight to the aircraft, that’s cutting it very close with boarding and passengers might miss flights? But if they build in a buffer, it seems like passengers would still kill time in the lounge?
Nonetheless, at least they’re trying to think different with premium services and counter the fact that modern airports have become a huge time suck and inconvenience factor – especially considering that the very purpose of air travel is time efficiency.