First-class shake-up in the skies: The leisure takeover of premium cabins

As the coronavirus pandemic receded, holidaymakers surged back into the skies last year. And it was then that Lufthansa’s boss Carsten Spohr realised he had a problem, albeit a welcome one: the airline did not have enough first class seats to meet the boom in demand from leisure travellers. “This year is the first [in which] all my team tells me we need to grow first class . . . I never thought I would ever hear that,” Spohr recently told industry analysts. This spring, Lufthansa finally debuted a range of new long-haul cabins that included fully enclosed first class private suites with double beds, part of a E2.5b investment. And these long-awaited cabins illustrate how airlines are racing to set new standards in luxury flying as the industry continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic. After spending decades tailoring premium cabins to corporate travellers, who reliably filled them, airlines now face a challenge to adapt their products to a new kind of high-end passenger — the holiday-maker. That’s because, these days, the customers filling the highest priced seats are more often than not leisure travellers, who have spearheaded a boom in business class and first class travel over the past two years, in a significant shift for the world’s airlines. “In recent years, we’ve noticed a growth in the number of people in our premium cabins for personal leisure travel reasons, which is a shift from the traditional corporate travellers dominating the business and first-class cabins,” says Eduardo Correia de Matos, director of customer care at Middle Eastern airline Etihad. Airlines say they had started to see a rise in premium leisure travellers before 2020, but the pandemic has supercharged the phenomenon.<br/>