Originally Posted by brunos

The main question is whether you offer business class or not. If a new startup airline does, It has to offer a superior product.

CX/KA is an interesting case. FT posters tend to hate the regional business class seats where CX/KA charges a huge premium for mediocre seats. As CX is using some of its longhaul ac during the day on regional routes, you can see how pax go out of their way to book lie-flat seats and get very upset in case of a last-minute sub to regional seats.
But CX/KA have a different business model from Starlux. CX premium class demand on regional route is increased by premium class pax transiting from Europe, Australia and NA. And they offer high frequencies to major Asian cities.

Personally, I am unconvinced by these luxury small airlines facing huge competition from legacy airlines and LCCs. I am not aware of any that succeeded. Starlux will have to be both cheap and luxurious. That's impossible. To get back to the 82" business seat, a pair takes more space than two rows of 6 Y seats (pitch of 31"). Hence 8 J seats replace some 24+ Y seats. That makes it impossible to compete with LCCs. And the lack of transit feeder traffic makes it very hard to compete with legacy airlines. I assume that Starlux is trying to negotiate some codesharing with US airlines, but that is not easy.