Originally Posted by
irishguy28
I'm sorry, but that's not an elephant and it's certainly not in the room!
Even in the US that concept barely works (they end up "giving away" many of the seats in "First") - though anecdotally from briefly browsing the American carriers' forums here it seems that these upgrades are getting harder to come by lately - and there's simply no real demand for a similar offering in Europe.
By giving up the greater degree of flexibility (both the Y and J cabins can be dynamically re-sized - so a "shortfall" in J bookings can still allow an "overflow" of Y bookings), the cost of each J seat would surely be far far greater than it currently is, having sacrificed flexibility and efficiency for a separate J cabin.
If that style of separate, differentiated J cabin would work in Europe - one of the very very many airlines operating here (the market is still more fragmented than the US) would have introduced it by now and made a killing.
Just because something is the norm, or the standard, or seems to work in the US - which is a very very different market - does not mean it would work in Europe - even if of course the average passenger would of course like a "bigger" seat.
The only way this kind of differentiation would work is if the product offered something
significantly more. But for flights of up to 3hrs, what more could you really offer that would justify a price jump of 3x or more? I see a better use case to make it easier to buy economy flights with an extra seat, and better food (even if paid), than upgrading business class in a way that locks in flexibility for the airline too. I already do this in my European flights, but it just isn't easy to book.