The beauty of mid-range products

Once or twice, when on a crowded overnight flight, I have taken a sneaky stroll through the different cabins for the purpose of comparison. My reaction on first peering into each cabin goes like this. First class: ‘Gosh, this is fabulous. It’s like a restaurant in the air.’ Business class: ‘Ooh, this is nice; they get flat beds and everything.’ Premium economy: ‘Well this is OK; the seats seem comfy and it’s all pretty civilised.’ Economy: ‘It’s the “Raft of the Medusa”.’

Now here’s the thing. In terms of comfort, the biggest gap between two adjacent flight classes is between economy and premium economy. This improvement is simply achieved with seats a mere inch or so wider, with a tad of extra legroom and eight seats per row rather than nine – in a 2-4-2 seat configuration rather than the ghastly 3-3-3. Proportionately, it doesn’t cost much to do this – indeed premium economy is a very profitable cabin for airlines. This raises the suspicion that they make economy deliberately nasty to encourage people to upgrade – a theory first advanced by the 19th-century French economist Jules Dupuit to explain why third-class railway carriages had no roofs. Interestingly, Boeing designed the 787 to have 2-4-2 seating in economy; every airline outside Japan then squeezed in an extra seat in each row.

In a saner world, 50 per cent of the seats on a plane would be premium economy seats, priced at 30 per cent (not 100 per cent) more than economy. Yet this option does not exist.

And it’s kind of our fault. You see, the market for ‘pretty good’ is a surprisingly difficult market in which to succeed.