[mcbrown]

I'm pretty sure the premium-only airlines have all failed because (a) it's hard to start an airline, (b) there are only a few routes where there is enough demand to fill a premium-only plane (which exacerbates all kinds of issues from competition to poor gate/crew utilization to maintenance costs and so on), (c) most of the routes that could theoretically work are capacity-constrained, forcing these startups to use more remote airports (e.g. Eos flew into Stansted rather than Heathrow) which reduces their utility, and (d) did I mention that starting an airline is hard?

Other than that quibble, I enjoyed this post.

[dmethvin]

As an example, the all-business SAS flight from Houston to Norway was targeted at oil company employees [1]. It couldn't fly 7 days a week because they had to take the plane offline once a week for cleaning/maintenance and there was no other all-business plane to rotate into its place. They stopped the route because the oil price slump reduced travel of oil company employees.

[1] http://thepointsguy.com/2015/10/10-unusual-things-sas-737-tr...

[nickpeterson]

It would seem you would also need to own the airports for a luxury airline to work. That way you establish small airports near crucial business centers, with a similar upscale set of services.

[jdietrich]

London City Airport is effectively business-class only, but has very low utilisation despite providing a vastly better experience than Heathrow.