delta-golf: A quick logical question on the room aspect. On many long haul flights, a ticket may be 500 pounds in economy, 3000 pounds in business and 5000 pounds in first. And yet neither the business pax or first pax is using 6 and 10 times the space and weight of an economy pax respectively.
My feeling is that with economy so difficult to live with for frequent travellers, rather than once in a lifetime holidaymakers, that those travellers will pay a "premium" for anything else which makes the travel bearable, and the airlines can generate better revenue return by square metre of floor space and kilo of weight
carried. The spin off from this is that economy pax are actually subsidised by premium pax.
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It could be argued that if airlines used smaller aircraft and concentrated on premium classes, with a smaller, enhanced and more expensive economy section, they would in actual fact be more cost effective. Premium would not subsidise economy (better bottom line margins), economy would pull its own weight (actually generate margins rather than just covering fuel/ANC etc) and generate greater income per seat, operational and overhead costs would reduce with lower pax numbers per unit of revenue etc etc.
On a pure space basis, it's quite easy to see the amount of space used by a J seat if you look at an airline that has different configurations in the same aircraft. Take BA's two 744 configurations. Between doors 2 and 4, one has 36 W seats and 134 Y; the other has 32 J, 30 W and 40 Y. One W seat = about 1.5 Y seats (Y->W is about 22% increase in pitch, and 25% increase in width abreast). So 32 J = 103 Y seats, or 3.2 Y for every J.
The fare calculations aren't necessarily so easy. While the typical retail J fare may be 6 times the typical retail Y fare, many J pax are likely to be travelling on corporate deals which can easily reach and exceed 50% of the retail fare. A greater proportion of the Y cabin is likely to be travelling on their own money, paying a retail fare.
So in a sense, the J pax are "subsidising" the Y pax - and it must be so if J is more profitable than Y (which it is). But the Y pax have their function; in paying a goodly chunk of the costs of the operation, the airline can offer a higher frequency than if it had an all-premium operation and therefore make itself more attractive both to the premium pax and to the more discerning or picky Y pax. So the whole aircraft is really symbiotic.
The argument which you advance for smaller, better and more expensive Y cabins and more concentration on premium is great, but only up to a point. BA tried this and found that it didn't really work, so have gone back to regarding true Y as a real part of their market. A lot of true Y pax simply can't/won't pay the extra for better facilities in this enhanced Y, which is really indistinguishable from W. (Indeed, it seems that this is why W is the small size that it is, despite the fact that
per square metre it's the most profitable cabin on BA.) If you lose all the true Y pax, you'd have to cut frequency, and you become more vulnerable to the business cycle in premium travel. So it seems that you can't really do it completely except on very special routes.
Tightropes such as these are what, for me, makes the industry such a fascinating one to watch from the outside.