Third places

Although those options disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s, their return in the 2000s – and continued popularity in this decade – shows their importance. If today’s commercial aviation industry, so keen to eke out the last centimetre of space from seat, lavatory and galley, is installing these spaces on board, then there must be something to them.

Part lounge, part pub, part coffee shop, part networking opportunity, part chance to stretch your legs, the nature of onboard third spaces differs by class. Business and first class travellers on numerous airlines have places where they can congregate, and usually imbibe. That might be a sofa area for relaxing and chatting, like on Qantas or Thai Airways, a standup bar with bar stools like on Virgin Atlantic or Emirates, or a sit-down bar area like on Korean Air and Etihad.

(Korean Air’s is even co-branded with Absolut, and comes with a series of specially branded, half pre-mixed cocktails for the flight attendant staffing the bar to mix and garnish. ) It’s all rather reminiscent of the jet age, but it’s also key to note that – Virgin Atlantic aside – all the examples used so far have been on Airbus A380 aircraft, seen as flagship or even halo products for an airline’s service and market positioning. Will these spaces go the way of the Qantas Captain Cook Lounge as A380s are densified? Perhaps not, although they haven’t been rolled out to other aircraft with more traditional layouts of passenger accommodations. Yet, on some airlines, they are spreading slightly, slowly, and into premium economy.

Virgin Australia’s refitted Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, for example, is seeing a small self-service area for passengers in its middle cabin fitted. JetBlue, meanwhile, offers a mini-fridge between its Core upmarket economy section and its Mint fully flat bed product onboard its transcontinental Airbus A321 jets.

More and more airlines are figuring out that they can repurpose galley areas as third places too, whether that’s Air New Zealand’s 2010 story time, Finnair’s pull-down galley insert coverings, first with Marimekko designs and later nature scenes, or China Airlines’ persimmon-wood doors.

As passenger density increases workload for flight attendants, it makes as much commercial and passenger experience sense to enable passengers to DIY inflight as it does at check-in, and arguably more than at bag drop. It’s been a feature of business class for some years: British Airways has invited its Club World passengers to “raid the larder” since 1996, although its initial Saatchi-created tagline (“The new Club World larder. Corporate raiders welcome. ”) doesn’t quite hit the mark since the GFC.

While the small tray of plastic cups of water and perhaps orange juice were the most economy passengers could expect in previous decades, there will come a point at which on-demand seatback ordering becomes too much of an unincentivised chore for flight attendants.

The trick is, like jetBlue and Virgin Australia, to design both a place and a mechanism that enables true self-service. There’s no point in passengers wandering back to the main galley area and getting in the way if they’ve realised they’d like a drink half an hour before the trolleys are wheeled down the aisles. It’s more convenient for everyone if their third place is elsewhere.

But the real purpose of third places in the past – the local pub where friends meet, the local store where local ads are posted, the milk bar where kids congregated – was creating a community. That’s a hard thing to do on even the kind of flight that might last between five and 18 hours.

There’s no easy answer to creating community on a plane, nor even consensus on whether it’s a good idea. KLM’s much-ballyhooed “Meet & Seat” app where you can register your interest (and various web profiles) to meet a seatmate hasn’t proven a resounding success, nor have airlines been falling over themselves to replicate it.

So far, the third place on the plane has mainly been people gathering over a glass of something strong at the bar. But what might it be in the future?

British Airways invites its Club World passengers to “raid the larder”.