Thai Airways is taking an interesting approach to how it’s selling the premium cabins on some of its newly acquired planes. It might just make for the world’s best premium economy product, or something, as flagged by Live and Let’s Fly.
Those former Virgin Atlantic A330s are equipped with 264 seats, including 31 business class seats, 48 premium economy seats, and 185 economy class seats. The business class seats are indeed in a herringbone configuration, like you’ll find above.
What’s interesting is that historically Thai Airways hasn’t offered any sort of a premium economy product, so that was only introduced with these leased planes (the airline does now plan to roll it out on a widespread basis, following the industry trend).
So on flights on the above routes, I currently see the airline selling just premium economy, and not business class. But when you go through the process of booking a premium economy seat, you’ll see the actual premium economy cabin, with seats in a 2-3-2 configuration.
So, why does Thai Airways plan on selling its business class seats as a premium economy “plus” product of sorts? Broadly speaking, I suppose there are two possible explanations.
One is that the airline doesn’t think this product is up to business class standards. While I’m not a huge fan of this herringbone configuration, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, because this is a better hard product than on some of Thai Airways’ other planes.
I think the other possible explanation is that these are routes on which there just isn’t much business class demand, so the airline figures it’s better to save on soft product costs, and instead brand all the premium seats as premium economy instead. I suspect that’s what’s going on here, especially with markets like Dhaka getting this.
When I flew to Dhaka on Kuwait Airways several years back on a three-cabin A330, I was booked in business class. However, the airline seated business class passengers in first class, and used business class as “overflow seating” for economy class, given how little premium demand there was. So I suspect that’s going on here.
So I sort of get what the airline is going for, but I can’t imagine the airline will generate much incremental revenue by branding this as a premium version of premium economy. After all, markets with limited business class demand also typically have limited premium economy demand, let alone demand for a product that’s an upcharge above the standard premium economy. For that matter, having 79 premium seats sure is a lot of premium capacity in markets without much premium demand.
We’ll mark this as “developing” for now, but it sure is interesting…
Bottom line
Thai Airways is introducing Premium Economy Plus, which essentially seems to a rebranding of the carrier’s A330 business class on ex-Virgin Atlantic planes. The airline has both business class and premium economy on these planes, and is selling business class as a premium version of premium economy instead.
A great solo travel tip spotted this week on One Mile at a Time.
