Emirates' new A350 will make its debut in Bologna. Ticket taken, I couldn't pass up this opportunity.

When you say "buy it sight unseen" is what I did yesterday morning. I had just disembarked from Lufthansa's A380 from New Deli when, in my inbox, I see Emirates' press release announcing the debut of the A350/900, The first new aircraft to join the EK fleet since the debut of the A380, practically a geological era has passed.

Before I even read it, I flag the news to Matthias, then I get to the bottom of the communication and, much to my surprise, I see that in the list of top 3 European destinations is. Bologna. We are not talking about just any occasion, is not just any flight and Being lucky enough to fly from Bologna will be even more intriguing since I have never flown from this airport and for the stopover it will be a real historic day.

Emirates has been flying to the airport in Emilia for nearly 9 years, from here the holds of 777s often take off with valuable cargo from Maranello and beyond, this one of the reasons why not only EK flies to this airport.

Of course it won't be the debut, but removed Edinburgh, which starts in mid-November, Bologna's will be the second European route Along with Lyon to leave. The other routes in the Middle East and India did not make much sense to me.

I will therefore be in Bologna at admire the water cannon who will probably greet the event and then I will board curious to try the new business class cabin of which, at the moment, Emirates didn't say much.

Booking an award ticket with Emirates is super easy

When I saw that tickets were already on sale, I immediately opened the Emirates app And, as I sat on LH's A321 towards Frankfurt, I booked in 5 clicks the award ticket for the debut on December 1 in less than 5 minutes.

I was planning to detach an award ticket with Emirates, the reason was simple I had 77k Skywards points due at the end of October. However, I thought I would use them to try the premium economy on the A380 and instead I needed them for an even more historic occasion.

How many points I spent trying out Emirates' new A350

I'll say this up front-it was not a cheap ticket, because Flex tickets cost much more than savers, but for December 1, and for the following dates there were nothing but Flex Plus tickets.

The cost was thus 87k Skywards points, 77k of which are due in October, plus just under 400€ in taxes. Certainly if you think that with 54k points you can fly from Milan to New York may seem expensive, but as they say in these cases, "It's this or nothing."

The same ticket paid for in cash costs just under 3,250 euros, so I can consider myself satisfied. Not to mention that being a Flex Plus ticket gives me the right to change/cancel the trip without penalty, so if for some reason EK changes plans I can act accordingly.

Few details about the aircraft configuration

There are currently few details on how the A350 will be configured. They will be set up in 3 classes: business, premium economy and traditional economy.

The seat map doesn't say much, except that it will be a classic 1-2-1 checkerboard configuration, what can be understood is that there will be no seats oriented in the opposite direction of travel, like the QSuite, and that the middle seats could turn into a honeymoon seat.

These are all speculations, however, as EK has not yet leaked anything at the moment.

• A350
• skywards