Creating a Premium Look and Feel Inside the Cabin
We all know that the look and feel of a cabin can make or break the experience for passengers, especially in premium classes where customers rightly expect the upmarket and often luxurious that airlines sell them. But which levers can airlines, their designers and the suppliers that create these products pull most effectively?
As the hubbub of the gate area and the crush of the jetway recedes, airlines can create an acoustic that is calm and welcoming, immediately setting the mood for the flight. On a recent trip, it was remarkable how some ambient chill boarding music, which included clear pre-recorded boarding announcements, really helped to decelerate after the overstimulation of the airport environment.
More widely, considering all the acoustics in a cabin, including how the enormous open spaces of overhead bins, sound-reflecting plastic sidewalls and the hard surfaces of premium cabin suites, will be increasingly important, especially since modern aircraft are markedly quieter than their predecessors when it comes to cabin noise.
Lighting is also vital, not least because every surface in the cabin reacts differently to different intensities, directions and warmth of illumination. Smart airlines have multiple boarding LED lighting programmes that consider the diurnal white balance — warmer white lighting for evening or early morning flights, cooler white for daytime flights. Phones and other devices have had these features for nearly a decade now (Apple introduced Night Shift in 2016), while most aircraft lighting systems support this kind of scene.
Airlines can also use background LED light washing as a strong branding element, especially upwards on overhead bins and ceilings and downwards at the sidewall. This combines well with a careful choice of materials for seats and other cabin elements, with mica effects and micro textures playing particularly well with lighting.
Indeed, the choice of seat and monument materials is perhaps the make or break for a premium feeling. Some textures even on hard plastic surfaces can make a real difference to appearance, as well as the way the surface catches the light of the cabin, the way it reflects sound, and whether it looks like something a passenger might like to touch. Purely in the realm of thermoplastics, suppliers offer such a wealth of textures, colors and tactile effects, with many intriguing options that designers and airlines have yet to explore softer materials can add real luxury while also improving durability in key areas.
Seat coverings are often the most colorful and brand-distinctive element in the cabin, yet these need to be inviting to the touch — and, crucially, look more premium than what a passenger might ordinarily find in economy. Expanding this kind of material across the seat, including to armrest covers, vertical surfaces, seat/suite shrouding, doors, and so on can do a lot to make a space feel more residential and luxurious.
It’s also notable that many of the well-received recent premium cabin product announcements offer pops of color and a change of texture inside their key storage areas, like Cathay’s Aria business class seat in its innovative in-console storage, as well as the red splashes in the larger storage compartments of the new first-class suites from British Airways and Air France. Carpet or non-textile flooring like laminate effects, including around the seat floor area and any elevated surfaces on the seat like the angled semi-footrests on certain products, also needs to be considered.
Crucially, all this needs to be considered in the round, as an aesthetic gestalt, a full cabin. It’s not enough to simply swap in a full set of new seats with an updated look and feel without also ensuring that everything around it in the cabin — the lighting, the sidewalls, the monuments, the carpets, the acoustics — matches the desired upmarket look, feel, sound, and touch of the experience.