ILLUSTRATION: GARY HOVLANDENLAR
As airlines inflate premium-cabin offerings, travelers no longer know what amenities to expect
Sometimes first class means you get a 6-foot-long bed and a large entertainment screen in your personal suite. Sometimes first class means a skinny seat with a slight recline, no entertainment other than jokes from a chatty flight attendant and a snoring seatmate to climb over to get to the bathroom.
And sometimes those two extremes are offered on the same route by the same airline for the same price.
The causes of the confusion: Airlines have been inflating premium-cabin offerings, cooking up special cabins for particular routes and moving more international planes into domestic service. As a result, some travelers don’t know what they will actually get when they buy a first-class ticket or land an upgrade.
American and United have at least three different versions of “first class” on domestic routes, for example. New brand names for premium cabins add to the fog: Delta Air Lines’ Delta One, for instance, is better than Delta’s first class, even though it is sold as business class.Even online travel agency computers get confused. First-class seats on some United flights are also sold as business-class seats for $600 less than the first-class price. Since there is no business-class cabin on the plane, you get the same first-class seat you get with the more-expensive fare. Shoppers searching for first-class seats pay more unless they search for business class and find the lower price.
Sometimes travelers get confused. Richard Cohen says his son flies regularly between New York’s Kennedy Airport and Los Angeles International and raves about American’s A321s with flatbed suites and direct aisle access from every seat in first class. So when Mr. Cohen saw A321s offered for a Philadelphia-Los Angeles round-trip in late August, he splurged $1,150 for first class thinking he could get some sleep in the nice bed.
But the A321s flying between Philadelphia and Los Angeles are radically different from the A321s flying between New York and Los Angeles, even though the cross-country route differs by just 74 miles. What Mr. Cohen, of Margate, N.J., got was plain domestic first-class—a seat a bit wider and better-padded than economy, with more legroom and slight recline.
“It’s like paying for steak and getting hamburger and the restaurant saying they call their hamburgers steaks,” Mr. Cohen says.
The service was good, he says, just not what he thought he paid for, and he couldn’t sleep on either leg of the trip. When Mr. Cohen complained to American, an employee told him by phone the front cabin was considered “business class,” he says. Customer relations apologized by email that “business class’’ didn’t satisfy him and gave him 4,000 bonus miles.
American says the version of the A321 it flies between Philadelphia and Los Angeles does have domestic first class and agents mistakenly called it business class. The airline doesn’t differentiate various A321 first-class cabins in its schedule, but tries to make it clear the A321 lie-flat beds are offered only between New York and both Los Angeles and San Francisco. When booking, the only way to tell would be to look at the seat map, spokeswoman Jenna Arnold says, or read up on American’s fleet.
American’s first-class cabin on Airbus A321 jets between New York and both Los Angeles and San Francisco is much fancier than first class on A321s on other routes. PHOTO: AMERICAN AIRLINES
American’s own website has a hard time keeping track of its different A321s. The aircraft listed for Philadelphia-Los Angeles nonstops are labeled A321B. So are the New York-Los Angeles planes. American says it would prefer to label the New York-Los Angeles service A321T, for transcontinental, but airline reservation systems don’t accommodate that designation. “The only way we can differentiate, unfortunately, is through the seat count,” Ms. Arnold says.
The seat map is also a way to tell if the plane you’re on has undergone a refit with new seats or will have an older cabin configuration, American spokeswoman Laura Nedbal adds.
Front-cabin confusion is the result of airlines creating new products and marketing monikers for specific markets. In addition, they are moving more international widebody airplanes with fancy lie-flat beds into domestic routes and pushing to upgrade premium cabin offerings that leaves some planes upgraded and others lacking.
The confusion also comes as airlines are trying to sell more high-price first-class seats at discounts rather than give away upgrades to frequent fliers.
Sometimes different flights on the same route have very different versions of first class and savvy travelers choose planes carefully. United flights between San Francisco and Houston have lie-flat beds and on-demand video screens in first class on new Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Other trips on the same route flown with smaller Airbus A319s have a narrower, shorter seat that only reclines 6 inches and comes with half the space and no seat-back entertainment.
First-class tickets are usually the same price whether on the 787 or the A319. United says some ticket buyers just luck out. But some travelers check carefully, and United says it sells more first-class seats on the 787s.
Other times customers may lose out. Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity priced a one-way first-class Los Angeles-Newark ticket on Sept. 25 at $1,898 on United nonstop flights. United’s website has the same seats on the same flights at $1,298. The $600 difference? United offers the $1,298 as a “business-class” price, but none of the planes on that route have business-class cabins, so you get a first-class seat. United’s website knows the difference, but the central airline reservation systems used by travel agencies, called Global Distribution Systems, or GDS, don’t.
United says it uses business-class fare codes for the discount first-class prices because GDS allow only two prices for first class and two for business class—usually a full price and a discounted price. For domestic routes, United employs the business-class fare codes to load multiple discounted first-class prices, spokesman Rahsaan Johnson said. “We think this is a better set of options for customers than simply offering higher first-class fares that align with GDS functionality,” he said.
Fares aren’t the only source of confusion. United uses three different brand names for its cabins in the front of the airplane: Global First, United BusinessFirst and United First. Global First means premium service on long-haul international routes with lie-flat beds and multicourse meals. BusinessFirst is similar on long routes but not as fancy. United First is basic domestic first-class service.
On routes where it has international airplanes like the 787 Dreamliner flying domestic trips, such as Houston to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver, United doesn’t market that as “BusinessFirst” even though the 787 has the flat-bed cabin. It is just called United First. Dreamliner domestic flights get regular first-class meal-and-beverage service and regular flight-attendant staffing.
Delta launched Delta One in December as a rebranding of its BusinessElite cabin—its premium cabin for long international flights and transcontinental trips. As BusinessElite improved in recent years, Delta wanted a new name that “elevates it above business class,’’ said Mauricio Parise, Delta’s director of world-wide marketing communications. But the airline doesn’t call it first class because it is priced as business class—many companies won’t pay for first-class employee travel.
Corrections & Amplifications
United 787 Dreamliners have a premium cabin branded as “BusinessFirst.” An earlier version of this article said the cabins are branded as “Global First.”
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