Up to snuff

The passenger experience conundrum of secondary-to-secondary flights

The great age of the next-generation twinjet is at hand. Opening up secondary-to-secondary point-to-point flying, the Boeing 787-8 and Airbus A350-900 (and, on a smaller scale, the Airbus A321neoLR) will change the way we fly.

Yet the passenger experience has yet to truly keep pace for premium cabin flyers, who to a large extent are the key drivers of many secondary-to-secondary routes. Without those passengers, these routes cannot and will not survive, but airlines have been remarkably slow to develop before-flight passenger experience – and particularly before-airport passenger experience – that truly makes these flights desirable as experiences rather than just as a shorter route between A and B without going through C.