Same. Don't care about perks, just give me 1.5-2x the space, and I'll give you that much more money.

Instead, many routes are either cram in tight for cheap, or buy a first/business class with room to lay. Just give me something in the middle, please...

Most airlines have premium economy these days. It's the same as economy but the seats are a reasonable distance apart.

For domestic flights premium economy feels nearly indistinguishable from standard. Even with more leg room they're still the same width.

It feels like Premium Economy is what Economy was a few years ago, and Economy is basically anything they can unbolt and sell me seperately. I fully expect my next flight's safety lecture to feature "In the event of tubulence, please tap your card next to the contactless icon for the oxygen mask to drop."

What I'd like to see is an airline with: * Single-class seating * No frequent flyer programme.

First and business class create weird perverse incentives: they'd rather leave seats empty most of the time in the hope they'll get a few business travelers not spending their own money, or people who managed to grind their way to Triple Oganesson status and managed to drag an upgrade out of the system. The rest of the time, it's just an obnoxious reminder that they could be providing a better experience, but you're not paying them enough to get it.

Frequent flyer programmes will never make sense for a large section of passengers. So again, it's just another thing to hassle customers with, either as extra steps in checkout, or a place to say "well, if you spent enough money with us every year, we'd let you skip to the front of a queue."

I think the most flights I've taken in a year was four return trips, to two different destinations, using three different airlines. There's no way I could generate enough points to earn meaningful status or "free" travel in a practical timeframe, and even if I could, it's not going to change the fact that many city pairs have limited service choices. I'm not sure there are enough points you can give me to justify injecting a 50% price premium, flight change and four hour layover into a trip that's three and a half hours if I go direct via $other_airline.

The best I could do is instead intentionally select a rewards credit card programme, and attempt to divert spending to that to attempt to rack up points. If I'm going to use a rewards card, I'll use one that reimburses me in actual money, instead of a corporate scrip subject to surprise devaluation or blackouts. Theoretically if I line everything up just right, I could get 42% back in the form of Air Koryo Fun Points, but only if I use the card on months with no "R" to buy UberEats delivery of pork rinds. By comparison, 1.5-2% of hassle-free American Dollars across any purchases feels like less of a cryptic puzzle made by a DM who spends too much time in Excel, and more of an actual incentive.

Whenever I’ve looked with seatguru they’re the same seat size as economy.

Yeah, it's the same seat, the only dimension that increases is distance between the seat in front, but increasing one dimension provides more space, yes?

It depends a lot on the airline. Some of Air New Zealand's premium economy seats are better than some business class seats I've flown, some (looking at you, United Economy Plus) are literally just a few extra inches.

Not nearly big enough. It -feels- like those were standard seats of yesterday, and regular economy got even smaller.

Give me 6 inches extra width and legroom. That would be 30% wider, and about 20% longer, for a total of 156% of original total area. It would make everything feel so much nicer that I'd gladly pay 156% of the ticket price, if not more.

First class is often not more than 1.5-2x… so I guess the airlines did that!

Um..no?

I just looked up the long haul I've taken most - Detroit to Tokyo.

Delta economy is $1160. Delta business is $16,983.

First is available via United, for over $24,000.

Not enough people would happily pay extra for this idea to fly

Maybe a small airline could analyze demographics of certain routes/times and carve out a niche serving upper class clientele or something.

And London to LA or NY are definitely routes with that demographic.

The last all-business-class flight that served London to NY (BA1/BA2) was shut down in 2020.

It flew from LCY to JFK with a stop at Shannon in Ireland for quick refuelling and US Immigration preclearance (so you landed in NY like it was a domestic flight). It was an Airbus A318 in a 32 (if I remember correctly) all business class configuration.

It stopped in Shannon to refuel, since LCY is too short for commercial transatlantic hardware to take off with enough fuel. The customs clearance in Ireland was a smart way to take advantage of the stop to make things less painful in New York.

Brexit probably killed it

Nothing to do with Brexit at all, since Brexit had 0 impact on travel between the UK and the US, or on air travel between the UK and Ireland for that matter, because neither of those countries were in the Schengen area.

Covid killed the flight.

Brexit killed England as a financial center. That also impacted travel to the usa

The big airlines have business class and first class. You can pay more for a nicer experience now if you want now, hard to see being able to run a first-class only airline.

A few exist, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Compagnie

If infants are involved I would.

This is why I only book Alaska when flying out of PDX. I know the quality of service I will get and I don’t even bother looking for cheaper flights.

I really don’t know why anyone flies the major carriers domestically. They aren’t better in any way than Southwest and they aren’t cheaper than Frontier.

I have money so I pretty much only look at SW for domestic flights. I would only start flying Delta/United/AA if I had so much money I weren’t flying coach or if I lived in a market SW didn’t serve.

Can't speak for the US but the extra cost buys you reliability and convenience. I can be late to checkin and assuming the gate's still open I'll make it out on time. Try doing that on a budget carrier.

But how does it compare to SW? I’m trying to not sound like a shill, but do you have free cancels and changes up to 10 minutes before boarding, kiosk check in and curbside baggage check? Super easy to use website and app that doesn’t hide costs and also makes it easy to change flights and see the exact price difference and actually refunds you money if the new flight is cheaper?

With SW I’d be completely comfortable booking a flight 6 months out that I had a 25% chance of actually taking.

I’m trying to actually understand why the major airlines have customers.

Delta gets most of my business travel. I live near a second tier Delta hub (Boston) and all of my recurring business trips in the US are non-stop (most) or one-stop (a minority).

I can book my trip, select my seat (none of the trying to check in 23h59m59s998ms ahead, only to find you got A12 anyway and then 42 people had some reason to have priority boarding including the in-flight miracles where someone needs a wheelchair to board early, but walks off on their own), and if there are irregular ops challenges, Delta likely has 2-5 other similar flights in their network.

We fly SWA sometimes for personal travel and I can say “it’s better than Spirit, but I prefer Delta.” (We fly Delta even when it’s our own money, unless SWA has a non-stop and Delta doesn’t.)

Isn't SW the airline that completely fucked almost all of its customers nationwide last holiday season because they don't have a hub and spoke network? That is probably a good enough reason not to rely on them at this point.

You can buy business class. Much better service and much better comfort. But you probably don’t want to spend that much, which is where the problem lies.

Seems you're completely missing the point. The baseline experience is much worse for the same or more cost. Of course spending (a lot) more money gets you a better experience. That's probably part of why they make the baseline experience so unbearable.

> for the same or more cost

Adjust for inflation, and baseline tickets are cheaper than they were a decade ago, and significantly cheaper than they were a decade before that. The only reason the difference isn't even more significant is that prices are now at the point that it's nigh-impossible to cut anything further and still have a functional flight.

Interesting if true, I hadn't noticed that.

Air Canada has a premium economy option on many flights, that costs like 20-50% extra for more width and legroom. I've never been tempted by it though— until there's a lie-flat bed it's still just going to be a long uncomfortable sit no matter what.

I wonder how many people do pay for it vs just get it as a status/points upgrade.

I mean, Delta’s certainly not amazing (although, ok, Delta One is awfully nice), but I will still 100% go out of my way to book them over, say, United or American.

Like a sibling commenter, I fly PDX so will usually fly Alaska but Delta is a solid #2.

Airlines are reflecting the demands of the consumers