Originally Posted by
twoaisleplane
I think CO marketed EWR-LAX as a BF route in the early nineties on the DC-10's (I can sort of remember the ads for it, and flew it a few times), but once they dropped that, they ran a domestic first class service in the face of 3-class service on UA and AA, and BE service on DL, all the way until the merger. So clearly they were not worried about providing a product at EWR that was totally uncompetitive with what others offered at JFK. That mentality is what concerns me.
The current vastness of premium flat-bed service on transcons is kind of a new concept. Delta dumped their service to one-class Song for awhile in the early 2000s before United offered ps service. When Delta resumed the transcon they offered mostly flights with normal First Class seats and only some BusinessElite seats. In fact, as recently as a few years ago some Delta transcons had regular First Class. JetBlue is new to flat-bed the market and Virgin still doesn't have flat-beds. So this recent richness of options is the market in which United will be operating from Newark later this year. How Continental operated earlier isn't an apples-to-apples comparison because the market was different back then. Flat-beds were a novelty at the time.