Simply Smarter

The seats to me are the crescendo of that experience. hans hulsbosch

Hulsbosch says his role is to ensure everything comes together, from the time a customer books a ticket online, to the terminal experience at check-in, the airport lounge and eventually the seat itself. “I oversee all those elements and make absolutely sure they all connect,” Hulsbosch explains in an interview with Australian Aviation.

“Everything needs to fall in place with everything else that we are doing. It won’t be standing out from the rest, it will enrich the whole experience.

“Now, the seats to me are the crescendo of that experience. That’s got to look amazing, so all that work that you’ve done to get there needs to be absolutely right, that when you step in that seat, you go, ‘wow, how good’s this’. ” Virgin spent a little over 18 months developing this new premium product, first choosing a seat manufacturer and then tailoring that basic seat with a series of bespoke features that offered a luxury look and feel that maintained the tone and image of Virgin’s brand.

The airline took a seat from manufacturer B/E Aerospace and along with design agency Tangerine London and Hulsbosch, stripped it bare and customised it so that “there isn’t really an ounce of the original left” by the time it was unveiled at a media event in Singapore on September 24.

“Everything’s about a seamless experience,” Hulsbosch says.

“You make absolutely sure that everything is connected, everything works perfectly the way it should

We had an endless discussion around the coat hook on the back of the seat – I kid you not. MARK HASSELL.

I have used this mantra from the beginning, and it’s that everything has to be simply smarter. ” Testing was extensive, with Virgin staff sleeping in the seats overnight to determine the comfort level of the mattress, as well as its the general ergonomics and manoeuvrability.

There were also little touches added such as making sure the carpet around the seat is richer and thicker than in the aisle because that is where a passenger takes their shoes off.

And the proliferation of devices carried by passengers today prompted Virgin’s team to design a special stowage area for tablet’s and other electronic kit “so there’s no danger of it falling on the floor”.

“We specifically made that,” Hassell says during an interview with Australian Aviation at Virgin’s Sydney airport lounge.

“They never existed when we did [the current business class] seats five years ago and now they do and everybody’s worried about where they put it, and if it’s going to slide down the side of the seat. ” Moreover, the need for that wow factor perhaps explains Hassell’s fixation, make that near obsession, with the coat hook during one stage of the design process.

“We had an endless discussion around the coat hook on the back of the seat – I kid you not, we did,” Hassell says.

“I didn’t like it. I thought it looked like a cheap caravan and they all agreed. ” After a day of brainstorming the team came up with a “brushed steel solution” that met Hassell’s approval.

The issue of ensuring privacy for passengers seated in either of the two middle seats, which face towards the centre of the aircraft, was also resolved with a regressing rich purple sliding screen made of metal that Hassell describes as a “great piece of engineering work”.

“The potential of getting a privacy screen was in the too difficult basket and it was a threshold issue for that seat,” Hassell says.

“The guys came back with a superb response. It is actually a nice feature. ”It is these little touches and little details that Hassell believes makes Virgin’s premium product offering the “best business class seat in the world domestically”.

“It will be beautiful and people will get on that aeroplane and they’ll go straight to bed and people are going to be saying the flight’s not long enough,” Hassell says.

“It’s not the high density J class thing that you see on so many carriers.

“It’s very, very individualised, very private, you’re in your own cocoon which is wonderful. ” The first A330-200 will head to Singapore to have its new seats, which are manufactured in the United States, fitted in the new year, with the aircraft expected to be back in service by March. Virgin’s entire fleet of six A330s were expected to have the new business class seats by August.

Currently, the A330s have 24 seats in business class over four rows in a 2-2-2 configuration. The number of seats will be reduced to 20 once the new suites are installed, with the 1-2-1 reverse herringbone layout (the window seats face towards the window, while the two middle seats point towards the centre) ensuring every passenger gets direct access to the aisle and maximum privacy.

In keeping with Virgin chief executive John Borghetti’s well-documented fondness for luxury sports cars, the design team looked to replicate the look and feel of sitting in a Porsche at 38,000 feet.

“We used the feeling of a high-end luxury car,” Hulsbosch says.

“You know that John Borghetti and I both love Porsches. We used elements of that.

“What that means was that we needed to use beautiful fabrics, and the trip detailing was important. ” Hassell, who joined Virgin in January 2012 having previously worked with British Airways and Qantas, says he even got some B/E Aerospace staff to sit in an employee’s old Porsche in the company carpark to see for themselves what he and Hulsbosch were after.

“So we sat in the car and we’re sitting down like this and I said ‘I don’t want bling and I don’t want shiny chrome, but I want this. Look at that, just look at that gear stick, the way it’s blended, the leather and the brushed steel come together. That’s what I want’. ” Beyond the seat itself, the design team also looked at the whole cabin, from the shapes and finishes, the colour and the lighting. Not to mention the presence of a Virgin cabin crew member decked out in red.

“Everything spins off that, because your eye always goes to the uniform and that’s really important because she’s, kind of, in control,” Hulsbosch says.

“We placed that crew member in the middle of a space and we saidwe designed everything around this person and this red shape. ” Following the refit of the A330s, which are used on services between Australia’s east coast capitals and Perth, it will then be the turn of Virgin’s fleet of five Boeing 777-300ERs to have their new interiors fitted.

The big Boeing twins, which fly to Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi, will come out of the maintenance hangar with the new seats, which B/E have labelled the Super Diamond, a redesigned business class bar and updated premium economy cabin.

Work on the 777 fleet is due to start in November 2015 and be completed by early 2016.

By that stage, Virgin will have a consistent business class product across its international long-haul fleet (the 777s) and transcontinental widebodies (the A330s).

“That to us was like a powerful win-win,” Hassell says.

Hassell says the current business seats on the 777, which are in a 2-3- 2 configuration, are getting a bit old.

“The challenges of the seat were privacy because it’s a very open cabin, it’s a very big cabin with flat walls, high ceilings, lots of space,” Hassell says.

“All of the seats are very open, they’re not discreet in any way, so there was a privacy question for me.

“We do have middle seats which are less popular, so that was another question that we needed to deal with, and 100 per cent aisle access, which as you know continues to be an increasingly mandatory requirement with next generation seating. ” The design of the new bar for the 777 will will allow a cabin crew member to be behind the bar and allow greater interaction with passengers.

“The crew told us loud and clear that ‘hey, we feel it could be a lot better,’ ” Hassell says. “The present bar is literally a bulkhead to all intents and purposes with some seats around it but the crew can’t actively participate in that service because you can’t get behind it.

“So we built a bar that you can actually get behind so literally it is going to feel very New York cocktail smart – elegant, beautifully finished, intimate. ” Despite so much customisation and the numerous extra touches, Hassell says there was never any thought given to Virgin conducting a clean-sheet design of a brand new seat.

“The days of that model are gone in a lot of ways,” Hassell says.

“I think you can do that in first class if you wanted to do that for a really small bespoke number of seats but a number of airlines have tried that over the years and invariably the costs get out of control.

“At the end of the day we’re an airline, we are not a seat designer, we are not a seat manufacturer. Let somebody else do the heavy lifting. ” Next up for Hassell and Hulsbosch is overseeing Virgin’s move to a new domestic terminal at Perth Airport, which will include a new lounge and checkin experience.

The Dutch-born Hulsbosch, who spent many years working with Qantas and whose design strategy company Communication by Design has worked with clients such as Woolworths, Rebel, MLC and Dettol, says the design of Virgin’s Perth terminal will set the tone for the carrier’s other Australian airports.

“What we’re doing there hopefully is revolutionary and it needs to be because the whole experience needs to be improved,” Hulsbosch says.

“It’s a stressful time. When you get to the airport and that big hall, I get out of that big hall as fast as I can because it unnerves me a little bit.

“There has to be another experience that is better, that is more human, more user-friendly and we’re working on that. ” Competition for premium travel in Australia is hot right now, with both Qantas and Virgin rolling out new product upgrades at the same time.

And both carriers are making their pitch at the high-yielding business travel sector. Qantas says it has about 80 per cent share of the corporate travel market by revenue.

Meanwhile Virgin, which first offered business class in 2011, estimates about 25 per cent of its domestic revenue is from that market segment.

While these investments are at a time when both Qantas and Virgin have recorded heavy losses, the outlook presents a slightly brighter picture. Qantas expects to post its best first half result since 2010 with a forecast underlying first half profit of between $300-350 million dollars, while Virgin has guided the market to an underlying profit for the second quarter of 2014/15.

Qantas has already begun reconfiguring its A330 fleet, which fly domestically within Australia and are also used to Asia, with a

There has to be another experience that is better, that is more human, more user-friendly and we’re working on that. HANS HULSBOSCH

new business class seat designed by Irish-based Thompson Aero Seating in collaboration with Marc Newson.

The first two aircraft are currently getting new seats installed at Qantas’s maintenance facility in Brisbane and the first is expected to take to the skies before the end of 2014. Work installing new seats on all 28 Qantas A330s is expected to be completed by 2016.

The Flying Kangaroo released the first images of its new business class offering in August 2013, some 14 months before they were officially unveiled to the world at Sydney Airport in October 2014.

Being able to see what Qantas was going to do so early on “wasn’t inthe least bit unhelpful”, Hassell says.

But we’d already started the work,” Hassell notes. “All of the key objectives didn’t change. ” “Did we adjust some things? Yes, we did and we had the time to do it because it was still very much in its infancy, but the result is a terrific result and I’m very pleased with it because the great thing about it is there’s a lot of TLC into the seat.

For its part, Qantas says its own upgrade of its A330 business class prompted Virgin to respond, according to chief executive Alan Joyce.

“It forced our competitor, who has recently taken a new aircraft with new seats on it, to rip those seats off and put new seats in,” Joyce said at the launch of Qantas’s new seats.

“That’s great that that’s happened. It means less money for other products, less money for lounges, so I am quite happy that Qantas is defining the way and making our competitor scramble to catch up and making our competitor make decisions like that. ” Putting the banter between the two fierce rivals to one side, it is clear Australia’s two major carriers are investing plenty of resources to provide a premium travel experience that is miles ahead of any other domestic market around the world.

Says Hassell: “You want to get the seat mechanics and the seat frame that really is going to give you the most optimum outcome, but wrap around it some top-notch industrial design finishes and the overall look coming together, and you can get a winning cocktail coming out of it. ”