How premium leisure travel is rewriting airline economics

Previously, if business cabins were full of business travelers, the demands are actually different from if they're full of premium leisure travellers. And so you have seen airlines refocusing on service, on the food on board, on the wines on board, which are more loved and paid for by the leisure travelers than they are by the business travellers. That's McKinsey partner, Steve Saxon. Whether for business or leisure Premium travel is the thing that's contributing to airlines profitability. But The airline industry as a whole isn't making the kind of profit you might expect.

Steve joins me to get into the design, demand, and economics of airline travel. Oh This is the McKinsey Podcast, where we help you make sense out of the world's toughest business challenges. I'm your host for today, Lucia Rahili.

Steve Saxon, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lucia, for inviting me to be here. would like to start with a really tough question. That is the topic of much debate. Among my children. It's gonna draw from your two plus decades of consulting work with our travel practice at McKinsey.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (24 minutes, 3,963 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.