Originally Posted by
radonc1
For the life of me, I cannot understand why CO would sully the "BF" moniker by flying a shabby product to HI and marketing it as "BF".
I would hardly call the product "shabby." You're getting guaranteed deep reclining seats, personal IFE, power ports and an enhanced meal service. AA gives you deep reclining seats (well, angled flat, but they're narrow), no personal IFE, the power ports are working now but were out for an extended period of time, and regular meal service (2 choices). DL has regular FC seats though I think they have personal IFE. UA seems to be the worst, regular FC seats and no personal IFE.
They should either change the marketing and call it something like "enhanced International Business" which to me would mean a 767 with a meal served on a tablecloth
and nothing else, or provide the full Monty of a BF product. It sounds as if they are not going to do the latter so change the marketing name and provide us the former
.
Well, first off, Hawaii is not international. @:-)
Secondly, the world is not static. At the beginning, I believe the HNL BF flights were closer to international and certainly more differentiated from regular domestic flights and the competition. Now, mostly with cutbacks and maybe factoring in AA's use of int'l J seats on some routes, the differentiation, generally speaking, is smaller. But there's really no magic cut-off for when they can no longer use the BusinessFirst branding. It's the same with international BusinessFirst. In its early years, BF was much closer in both hard and soft product to other int'l first class products and rightly deserved the moniker. Over time as the competition upped its game in both business and first, particularly on the hard product, the differential is much smaller. But there was so much equity in the BusinessFirst name it never made sense to re-brand it, notwithstanding a bunch of whiny FTers who get all worked up over the name of a product.
I think now with the merger, they're looking at changing a lot of things, and it wouldn't surprise me if premium cabin branding is one of them. Both to HI and internationally.
I'd say go for "Business Premier" on 2-class flights (and just plain "First" and "Business" on 3-class) keeping with the FFP classifications (and since it effectively means the same as BusinessFirst in Franglais
), although I think NZ uses that already and not sure if it would be a problem. But of course that raises the question of whether or not the 2-class business should be differentiated from 3-class business. AA does this, but I don't think many other carriers that offer both do (e.g., BA, AF, CX, QF).