The Blurring Lines in Economy
If the low-cost carrier was invented by Southwest in Texas, it has been refined to a diamond-honed level across Europe in the shape of airlines like easyJet, Ryanair, Vueling and Wizz —and that diamond has carved away at the rock of the economy passenger experience across an entire continent. As an illustration, let’s try a thought experiment.
Walking down the jetbridge at a European airport, you board your narrowbody aircraft from the front door, walking past the first few rows until you find your seat in economy: it’s an emergency exit row with extra legroom, for which you paid a seating surcharge. You open the overhead bin for your rollaboard bag, which is the main reason why you bought the slightly more expensive ticket type that also included a checked bag. You sit down on the grey or blue slimline seat and start to peruse the onboard menu, since there’s no seatback entertainment screen to get stuck into.
Quick, it’s a test: are you on a low-cost carrier, a full-service airline or one of the newer generation of airlines that falls somewhere in between as a hybrid?
From our thought experiment, it would be hard to tell, even if we did look at the signature coloured trim elements that are, in many cases, the primary clue to which airline we’re on.
This blurring of lines between what were previously quite distinct types of airline stems from several drivers.
What they offer is space and privacy that really pushes the limit of business class towards first. Genuinely, from a hard product perspective, and from someone who’s flown them both, the Allegris Business Suite is superior to Lufthansa’s previous generation of first-class product, and while Virgin doesn’t offer a first class the Retreat Suite is superior to its main competitor British Airways’ previous-generation first class offering.
At the other end of the spectrum come products like Zipair Tokyo, the widebody low-cost carrier arm of Japan Airlines, which offers transpacific long-haul and intra-Asia short- and medium-haul flights. Branding itself as a “new basic airline”, Zipair offers a Jamco Venture outward facing herringbone seat onboard its 787-8 aircraft that is very similar in hard product terms to an earlier generation JAL product — except, crucially, without seatback inflight entertainment screens.
One of the interesting elements of both the upper end and lower end redefinition of business class is that they are very rarely differentiated via colour, materials and finish (CMF).
On the full-service airline side, most have moved to emulate the low-cost competitors that were, in many cases, eating their proverbial lunch — and charging extra to serve it to passengers. This means eliminating previously included onboard services like meals or drinks, reducing seat pitch, charging for elements that used to be part of the full-service ticket like seat selection or baggage, purchasing the most space-efficient slimline seats — and making colour, materials and finish choices based aimed more towards being hard- wearing than other factors so that the experience is even visually very similar.
Coming back to our thought experiment cabin, as we munch on our shelf-stable chorizo, cheese, olives and crackers tapas box and drink our little plastic bottle of gluggable red wine from the onboard trolley — all available on so many airlines — the question is how to innovate within this context. Could clues come from the new Japanese and Korean hybrid airlines like Air Premia, Air Japan and Zipair Tokyo — or indeed the more upmarket elements of low-cost carriers in the region like Peach, StarFlyer, or Jeju Air?