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by yinyinwu 2725 days ago
On a commercial plan, business travelers accounts for >70% of an airline's profits. My read on the article is that Boom is targeting the business customers on a commercial flight and faster transit time is one of the biggest wants for business travelers.
2 comments
notahacker 2725 days ago
They're a large part of some airlines' profits because there's a small number of people willing to pay silly prices on most routes at most times of day.

That doesn't translate particularly well to less frequent 55 business class seat flights on most of those routes; even if the flights are shorter the arrival times are probably a lot less convenient for most of the executives.

The all-business class model has struggled to be economically viable even on ideal routes like London-NY. Those economy seats give you a lot more flexibility when the business class seats aren't selling.

(And as ghaff pointed out business travellers /= business class; most people travelling on business have an economy ticket sized budget)

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ghaff 2725 days ago
Most business travelers don't actually travel business class. And don't get to pick premium levels of service. And that would be even less the case if those premium levels were at a premium over today's premium levels.
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yinyinwu 2725 days ago
The rate of business travelers who fly business class is not 100%, but it's very high for most airlines.

For US and European carriers, it's around 75%. Since the cost is 4 - 7x higher than commercial, most people aren't paying for this expensive personally. Not sure about other industries, but for consulting and tech, the standard is to allow a business upgrade on international flights and not domestic.

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ghaff 2725 days ago
i can't produce numbers but, anecdotally, the idea that 75% of international business travelers get to fly business seems...unlikely based on the people I know and even assuming my own terms are especially shabby. Very frequent travelers, i.e. greater than my own 75K miles per year or so, do get upgrades from time to time but the I dispute the idea that the typical tech business traveler is usually flying business.
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