Configuration. Economy, vs Standard, vs Premium

[specore]

Does the selection of seat types have much of an impact when configuring aircraft.  For example, is there a huge additional benefit to the additional cost of adding premium seats to a LH route? 

[Andre090904]

Quick answer: Unfortunately not.

There may be a new cabin configuration feature coming "soon", so hopefully it will change. But until then, just use standard seating.

[Mike Swaledale]

Andre is right, that higher quality seating appears to confer no competitive advantage.  The only thing I would add is that with some aircraft types switching to less dense seating can significantly increase range. To judge if this is helpful or not you need to look at the little range graph - if payload declines slowly with range, you can get a useful range stretch by using less dense seating.

[Ace McCool]

i completely disagree IMHO. i have seen many instances where I have lower load factors when I have changed from 'regular' seating to 'sardine' seating. There are good reasons why 'real' airlines have various seat configs!

Ace

[dmoose42]

In my experience, you start taking a penalty for using sardine seating for flights over two hours. Sami claims that upgrading from standard to premium has an impact over 5 hours, but I think most players would say it's negligible.

[Ace McCool]

i agree. thanks Moose!

[Andre090904]

The question in the first post was about premium seating, and I said it has no effect.

We once did an experiment flying an A340 and A380 on the same route without competition (the same airline flying the A340 and the A380). While the A340 had standard seats, the A380 had premium seats. Guess what, LF was the same for both. The premium seats did not attract more passengers.

HD seats do have a bit of a penalty, but you will only notice it if there is competition (aka better options for the pax).

[groundbum2]

The premium seats did not attract more passengers.

I wonder how premium seats do on a highly competitive route, eg EGLL-KJFK where 5 airlines are all supplying the demand?

Simon