Doing It With Class
Airlines get down to business, as pampering travelers leads to plumper profits.
Cuisine is also going upmarket. "We're more gourmet than economy classes, but it's not overtly chichi," says Caroline Chung, senior director of marketing for MAXjet, who designed the menus and many of the style details of the lavender planes. "We don't have caviar, but we have a really good beef tenderloin." Delta hired Michelle Bernstein, a celebrity chef from Michy's in Miami, to develop its menus. For its first-class passengers on flights between London and major cities in the United States and Asia, British Airways is developing more healthful menu choices. It is working with chefs from Thailand's Chiva-Som spa resort to make meals with organic ingredients, low in saturated fat and sodium.
Virgin Atlantic Airways reported a 10 percent increase in business travelers last year, which helped the carrier increase revenues by 17 percent over the previous year, to $3.6 billion. Virgin now has six daily flights between JFK and London, and its new clubhouse at Heathrow for business passengers provides massage facilities and a full spa.
Simon Bayles sits in the Emirates lounge at JFK, sipping champagne and tapping away on a laptop. He works for a boutique investment bank in London and holds three gold cards from three different airlines. "My company tries to find the cheapest and most comfortable way of traveling. Eos beats every business class, but it doesn't measure up to first class on Singapore Airlines or Lufthansa, in terms of bed technology and entertainment systems," he says. "But airlines are focusing so much on business class these days that the gap between business and first is closing. For example, here they serve Veuve Clicquot, while in first class they serve Dom Perignon-is that worth a 5,000-pound difference in the ticket price?"
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