Are you old enough to remember airline ads from the Sixties or Seventies? If so, you may remember . . . a steward or stewardess wheels a roast beef trolley down the aisle in order to carve a succulent slab to order for the business passenger. This vision is sometimes punctuated by someone resembling a sommelier pouring out a glass of something that looks like Château Margaux. Food and drink were once important criteria in choosing to fly business class — and on which carrier.
The selling points in our cost-conscious, high-tech, work-on-the-go environment are connectivity and space. Business travellers value both. Since the global economic downturn of 2008, however, many travel managers have tried to deliver that space by downgrading company policy from Business to Premium Economy. A lower cost to the company, however, often comes at a higher price to the traveller.
Carriers have always relied on premium class passengers for their profits. Those fares are also used to subsidise economy class tickets because revenue managers know that it is better for the bottom line to have planes as full as possible.
There is a large gap between published premium economy and business class fares so carriers are keen to tempt those who have downgraded to premium economy back into the fold.
This means the beginning of what will probably be a spate of new business class products and the emphasis is more on space than ever before — and privacy.
As Gulf carriers such as Emirates and Etihad have extended their networks and services more European business travellers have experienced their more relatively more luxurious products so expectations of business class are now going beyond the lie-flat bed.
And traditional carriers are responding with US network carriers leading the trend.
In June United announced that it would be relaunching its Polaris business class on 1 December. The marketing campaign is well under way and the clear message is that business class guarantees a good night's sleep and that the traveller will arrive at the destination well-rested, as demonstrated in this video.
Being well-rested is part of the new emphasis being not just on space but also on privacy. United's new Polaris seat is not just wider with guaranteed aisle access. It will be a pod to maximise privacy and ensure that the passenger doesn't have to endure the interruptions that aisle traffic sometimes brings.
Delta Air Lines is going one step further. It is upgrading its business class — Delta One — seat into a suite in the sky. The seat still converts to a lie-flat bed and has aisle access but each 'suite' now comes with a sliding screen to guarantee privacy — no need to worry about who might see a spreadsheet on the laptop screen.
According to Tim Mapes, Delta's chief marketing officer, "Added comfort and privacy are important to business travellers and that drove the design of the all-new Delta One suite."
Risk management — whether of travellers' safety or items of corporate confidentiality — is on every travel manager's agenda. Space and privacy are important to both corporate and traveller welfare.
Will these new products be enough to get those corporates that deserted a business class policy to revise their thinking?