United chases the growing luxury market
When the economy is slowing and oil prices are rising and consumers are flying less and businesses are starting to replace travel with video conferencing, what’s an airline to do?
If you’re United, you go after the ever-growing luxury market. Successfully.
According to the Wall Street Journal, United has taken some of its more popular routes and made the right much more comfortable in exchange for a more expensive ticket:
Take a Boeing 757, remove 40% of the seats and give customers lots more room, better food and flat beds. Does that sound like a typical recipe at a U.S. airline these days?
Hardly, but that’s exactly what UAL Corp.’s United Airlines did with two of its busiest, most-important routes, and last year they were the best routes financially for the airline in the country.
Not a bad strategy. I can’t say I’ve never wished for more legroom on a flight.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It is just too bad that UA is the only large airline tackling this opportunity. While I am not a UA fan I do find offerings like these to be very appealing.
This is really old news - UA rolled out this premium service years ago (I think just before or maybe just after 9/11). To the best of my knowledge, the only airlines to roll out new luxury service are non-US based carriers (Lufthansa’s new F and C, Singapore, Cathay and Thai’s new F and C). In this regard, the US hasn’t had any real innovation (unless you can call UA’s pathetically slow rollout of their new F and C an innovation) in many, many years. We could definitely use some.
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