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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

A weird thing about air travel is that going one step up from first/business class to a private jet comes with a massive decrease in the quality of travelling (exceptions are choice of route, flexible departure times and hopefully less time in boarder control/airports).

In most other walks of life, incremental increases in price come with incremental increases in quality

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How so? The quality of a transoceanic private jet is unmatched. It's basically a flying luxury apartment.

If you fly business class you get waited on hand and foot the whole time, get plenty of space to lie down and sleep, and a reasonably quiet environment. On the next step up (ie not spending millions and millions of dollars on your own plane), you’ll be on a much smaller (probably noisier) plane with fewer comforts (you’ll likely be back to sitting instead of lying down), worse food, fewer supplies of things you might want to ask for (that you didn’t specifically request in advance of the flight). Depending on how your flight is organised you may also have stricter scheduling requirements (maybe you could turn up a few hours early or late but maybe you couldn’t rebook your ticket for a different day). And for all that, you’ll pay a lot more.

What are you loosing in the quality of travelling from first/business to private jet?

I'm assuming the first step up is a small private jet. I took a small business jet from Omaha to I can't remember anymore South Dakota and 1980's business class from Oakland to Omaha was a lot nicer.

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