The Latest Innovation in the Premium Cabin Arms Race

Seats have been the biggest premium cabin innovation, with a huge leap forward in business class that limits the quality difference with first class.

For instance, Singapore Airlines first class is four seats across in the cabin — and so is business class.

That leaves only so many places to go as airlines compete for lucrative high yield passengers. So what’s next?

From The Onion:

…the airline’s most valued customers should ignore the escape path lighting along the aisle and instead follow the green lighting on the first-class seatbacks to a secret hatch just behind the forward lavatory. “For your convenience, in the event of an emergency, a bulkhead will automatically close and seal off the first-class cabin from the economy cabin, giving you ample legroom while deplaning. In addition, should we experience a sudden loss of cabin pressure, ignore the oxygen masks that drop from above and instead use the real ones located underneath your seat, right next to your emergency parachute.”

Personal rafts come with gourmet rations and video on demand.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

More articles by Gary Leff »

Comments

  1. Gary, the post is still truncated in my RSS. To keep your avid readers, please fix this immediately. If you purposely did this to make everyone come to your site so they click on your credit cards, then you will lose the trust of your readers. I will come back to your blog in a week to see if you have fixed this because it’s too frustrating at the moment. If you haven’t fixed it, I will assume you are just another credit card shill who doesn’t care about helping their readers but only cares about the money. I hope this is not the case.

  2. @Jon, the RSS thing is actually two issues:

    (1) the new system trying to pull a post summary at the top of each post, not doing that, and instead just grabbing text without formatting. That should be fixed shortly. Dealing with the change over the weekend was meant to minimize disruptions (lower readership, less news) but also meant some delays (on my end) in dealing with a few issues.

    (2) showing partial rather than full posts. this was a change i didn’t realize was going to happen with the changeover. it’s a system default i think that kicked in. Once #1 gets fixed I think I may give it a few days though to see whether it leads to more or less engagement with the blog. I realize there have been some vocal critics, and they may be right, but since this happened I’d like to see how it plays out over the next 48 hours or so. Sort of a natural experiment. And I apologize in advance to those who feel inconvenienced.

    As for my motivations you speculate about… “If you haven’t fixed it, I will assume you are just another credit card shill who doesn’t care about helping their readers but only cares about the money.”

    I’d suggest that this makes no sense. If I were “just another credit card shill” I would want full posts to display in RSS and distributed in emails, because that way credit card links would be more widely available (through RSS readers and emails) for folks to click on.

    A more reasonable criticism of me might be to suggest that I was opting for advertising views over convenience of readers, however (1) I do not currently get any ‘commissions’ from folks clicking on credit cards ads on the blog, (2) advertising revenue from a page view is far lower than from credit cards, so this configuration is likely costing me money.

    As I say I’d like to see what it means for engagement, less or more, since it’s a bit unintentionally in place.

  3. Mark me down as another reader that would REALLY like you to restore full article view in RSS. Love your blog but clicking over to read every article I want is very frustrating especially when on the subway when I don’t have Internet and can’t read your articles. It will definitely lead to less engagement from me and probably dropping your blog from my feedly blog list because it is too frustrating.

  4. @Gary
    I really appreciate the follow up. I am not a blogger nor web designer so I do not know the difficulties of changing websites. I have just been a little skeptical of the miles and points blogosphere lately because it seems like every post tells me to sign up for something. Other bloggers have “changed” to where they lost my trust and I just couldn’t keep reading them. I’ve been reading your blog since 2009, and I was afraid that I lost your trust which is why my last comment may have been a harsh overreaction. Thank you for reaching out and telling your readers what is going on with the RSS situation and that you are working on it.

  5. I’m also experiencing truncation of stories in the daily email. Very frustrating to have to link to the website on my mobile device.

  6. I also find the truncated posts frustrating, particularly because it makes review impossible when there is no internet service available. I have stopped reading other blogs with this issue.

Comments are closed.