If you want a glimpse of the sweet life at the pointy end of the plane, there’s one way to do it that doesn’t require a boatload of points or miles or cash. It’s by taking a short domestic flight where an airline has routed one of its internationally configured planes.
I’m not talking about premium transcontinental flights that are always set up for big spenders. I’m talking about one-off itineraries where airlines are trying to squeeze the most performance out of their planes, like the trip I have coming up to Atlanta later this summer, on which Delta currently has a flat-bed Boeing 767 scheduled for one of my flights.
If I get an upgrade, I’ll be cruising down to Georgia in style and maybe sneaking in a little nap in a fully flat bed. And even if I don’t get the upgrade, I’ll still benefit from a little more leg and elbow room.
An airplane is only making money when it’s in the air, so airlines typically try to keep their planes flying as much as possible, so it doesn’t become a drag on the bottom line.
“In general the reasons airlines do this is there’s enough demand and they can put these airplanes, fill them up and do it, but that really only makes sense if they can pair it with the slack in the system that they have from international flying that gives them free time to play with,” Brett Snyder, author of the blog Cranky Flier and owner of the travel agency Cranky Concierge, told me.
