Originally Posted by
jplondon
Yes I dont disagree, clearly business travel down and indeed more premium leisure. I wonder how the numbers add up, premium leisure on average must pay a lot less than old-style business traveller. My SH tickets last couple weeks are £600-1200 and my LH £6-18K for business due to short notice, short trips, fully flexible. My leisure premium flights are more £400 / £3000 in comparison.
Most leisure travel does get booked further in advance than a lot of business travel, although that depends on the business travel. If it's part of a regular route taken at regular intervals, or it's attending conventions and conferences scheduled years in advance, those trips don't necessarily end up as high cost air travel cost trips.
The way that I personally get front of cabin seating on leisure trips is that I book far in advance and I pick my dates based upon pricing. All things being otherwise equal, I might be as happy with a 2 week long trip originating on April 7th or instead on April 19th, I'll put up with that in order to save a lot of money while still having the sort of travel experience, in and out of the aircraft cabin, as I want.
So I might spend $4,500 on a round trip 1st Class ticket from the West Coast of the USA to Europe, but then I'm going on days when the airline isn't as certain that they can fill that set of seats at high prices to business travelers, or they wouldn't be offering them to me at a lower cost 9 or 6 months in advance, either.
Whether my $4500 on those dates for those seats is worth less than some business travelers $10K on days when they could fill the cabin 3 times over, well that's a question for bean counters at the airline and not for me.