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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

To start with, if there was no first or business class, there would be more room for everyone else on the plane ? It’s pretty simple actually.

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When airlines were first created there was no classes at all, there was also more space and comfort for everybody. Also, the ticket prices for those seats were so high that any ticket was just as unaffordable as first class would be today. The creation of economy class is the reason economy class flyers can indulge in the luxury of flight at all.

The only no-class commercial flights that operate today are the budget carriers, and they have the least comfortable offerings amongst all of the airlines.

No. First class helps subsidize the rest of the flight. Without it, the other seats would be either even smaller or more expensive.

Do you have any evidence of this or it's your opinion ?

Half the time I board a flight most of the first class is empty or non-existent, business is usually somewhat vacant and then there is literally hundreds of people paying $1500 for their ticket.

If you do the math, the vast majority of the flight is paid for by economy.

I invested in an airline for years and they talk about revenue per square meter in various cabins during earnings calls and press releases.

Economy (excluding Premium Economy) is the least profitable for the space.

Disagree. The airlines would just add more cattle-car seats.

Or worse, or there might be fewer flights since in general, first class subsidises the economy class on a price per inch of plane space basis.

We don't have to speculate about what they might do, as "the whole flight is economy class" is basically the budget airline business model (even though some of them have some flights that have a premium class). Apparently you can run an airline where the entire plane is cheap seating, and the outcome is the level of comfort and service provided by budget carriers.

Percentage-wise, budget operators don’t really skimp that much on things like seat pitch compared to mid-tier operators.

The way RyanAir operates is with dark patterns. They have very strict luggage rules. Everything is optional. Their booking has ambiguous wording, causing less-savvy flyers to purchase options they don’t need. They sell RyanAir lottery tickets (!) on flights.

It’s like playing a game that is solely fueled by cosmetic microtransactions. If you can/know to not give in to the various trappings, you get to play a good game for free. Except in this case the game is air travel and the win condition is extremely cheap airfare :)

I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.

This is wrong.

Non-budget carriers provide are more reliable and they provide food service and arguably better seating and entertainment.

I fly economy on a "premium" carrier all the time, and it's a much better experience but if I crunch the numbers, I fail to see how first class has much to do with the flight going ahead or not.

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