U.S. premium seat growth
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Where the big seats are
2024 has been all about the premium seats.
If airlines have premium seats, they’re talking about them. Even some airlines without premium seats are talking about adding them (Frontier, for instance, as well as Southwest to a much smaller extent).
Indeed, premium seats are suddenly important.
(For the aged among us [yours truly included] who remember 2001 when premium suddenly went out of fashion, the cycle is now complete.)
Since 2019, the number of scheduled economy seats in the domestic U.S. market has grown by 4%. Scheduled premium seats have increased by 14%—over three times the amount.
On a percentage basis, United Airlines has seen the largest growth. But United is growing from a relatively low base. The largest growth in overall domestic first and business class seats is American Airlines.
American has now passed Delta as the top premium seat provider in the domestic U.S. But, how?
Considering the airline and fleet, American has seen rapid growth in premium seats on its A321 and 737 fleets. This makes sense. The airline is taking delivery of 737-8 and A321neo aircraft.
However, regional aircraft have seen an incredible increase in premium seats since 2019, a trend lost on many. The second most significant increase in premium seats for American came from the E175. In fact, American’s E175 represented the fourth largest increase in premium seats among any of the fleets – trailing only the largest narrowbody fleets delivering at breakneck rate (well, breakneck for the OEMs, anyway).
This shows a surprising trend (surprising for this author, anyway) that a very large portion of the premium seat growth is coming from regional aircraft in regional markets.
And who said small city service was dead? They’re all in first class!
But there are a few elephants in the room to be addressed. The first is Spirit. Are those really business or first-class seats?
Well, no. At least, not in our opinion. We don’t see any passenger considering buying a first-class ticket on American to weigh the Big Front Seat on Spirit the same way. Yet, we do not judge when it comes to charts. Spirit files the seats as business class, so we count them as business class.
The other elephant is Breeze Airways. The absence of Breeze on the premium list is noticeable. After all, if we’re counting Spirit, we should certainly count Breeze, right?
Breeze does not file its premium offering with OAG as premium. Sans data, they don’t get counted, which is a shame. The Breeze Ascent offering looks pretty swanky.
But for the rest of the airlines, the all-economy label still holds. No exceptions. Cut-and-dry. Don’t look closer.
Then there’s JSX…
Happy Holidays, everyone.
Pop quiz – which aircraft?
There are two of them. Which ones are they?
The answer:
Remember the aircraft that we all love to hate but are glad they’re not around anymore? Yeah, well, they’re still around.
And they’re still around for a reason: They move people and make money.
Once considered the business jets of commercial air travel, the 50-seat jet is now the poster child for first-world problems – “But my jet taking me across hundreds of miles at 80% the speed of sound safely and economically is too small!”
Somewhere, a former Fairchild Metro passenger is laughing hysterically.
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