American Airlines announced it will cram more premium seats into its Boeing planes. The redesign targets long international flights. The company believes passengers with money prefer comfort over feeling like canned meat.
Groundbreaking stuff.
The airline spent months analyzing data that could have been collected by asking literally anyone who has flown internationally whether they would pay extra not to have their knees touch their face for eleven hours. The answer was yes. The data confirmed this. American Airlines will now sell more expensive seats.
Retail traders saw the headline and immediately checked their portfolios to see if they own airline stocks. They do not. They own seven shares of a battery company that has never produced a battery and three shares of a pharmaceutical startup run by a guy who got kicked out of medical school for cheating on an ethics exam. But they're monitoring the situation closely.
The premium push comes as American Airlines continues its bold strategy of charging human beings different amounts of money for different levels of suffering. First class gets free drinks and seats that recline. Premium economy gets an extra three inches of legroom and the psychological comfort of not being in regular economy. Regular economy gets a seat that was designed by someone who has never sat down.
The technical analysis here is simple. American Airlines looked at a plane. They saw empty space. They thought about money. They put expensive chairs in the empty space. Revenue goes up. Stock price does whatever stock prices do, which is nothing that correlates with anything happening in the real world.
The redesigned Boeings will feature the absolute maximum number of seats they can install before the FAA tells them to f*ck off. American Airlines calls this "optimizing the customer experience." The customer experience being optimized is the one where American Airlines extracts every possible dollar from every possible square inch of fuselage while you sit there and take it because you need to get to Frankfurt.
Photo by Dominic Bieri on Unsplash
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