Originally Posted by TURIN
Is there a market for a non-stop, premium service?
At the right price, there is a market for pretty much anything. The question is always whether a product can be delivered at the cost the market is willing to pay.
The problem with ULH non-stops from an airline perspective is that it usually also competes with the one-stop service offered by the same airline. If you strip the premium traffic (or a large part of it) from the one-stop services (as naturally premium traffic will prefer the non stop service, all things being equal), the one-stop service will cease to make money. If on the other hand the non-stop service is sold at a significant premium, demand will drop considerably. In reality the non-stop service only offers a 1.5-2h advantage, which in comparison to the total trip time is not very much, and needs to be weighed against the required premium. There are very few ULH city-pair markets where there is sufficient demand for such a non-stop service. If SQ could not make SIN-EWR work (I have no insight into the route exonomics, but I'm sure it was axed for the above reasons), what would ?