V Australia's Decision on Which Business Class Seat to Use

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend an event LAX at which V Australia introduced its first aircraft before flying it down to Australia. I’ve written details of the event on Cranky but here I wanted to focus on the interesting business decision behind choosing a business class seat. The airline has not gone with the best in class, and there are several reasons I imagine that to be the case.

As a Virgin airline, I would have expected V Australia to use the herringbone-style seats that Virgin Atlantic pioneered. You know the ones - they’re angled to face more toward the middle so that you have complete privacy. They also go into fully flat beds, and the product has received generally excellent reviews. At right, you’ll see the same seat on Air New Zealand, an airline which licenses its use from Virgin Atlantic.

But V Australia opted not to use that seat and instead go with a more traditional seat that has a 2-3-2 configuration. Yes, the seat still goes fully flat, but you have much less privacy than you do in the herringbone configuration, and the person in that middle seat really isn’t going to be happy being surrounded on both sides. So why did the airline go with this configuration?

I didn’t get any straight answers at the event. Sir Richard Branson was asked the question, and he simply responded that the V Australia team chose the seat that was best for them. Ok. So we have to try to connect the dots here. Why would they do it?

My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the amount of real estate onboard and the weight. Though the herringbone requires less pitch between seats (about 30 inches less), it can fit fewer seats in a row. On the 777, Air New Zealand has only four seats across in Business whereas V Australia can fit seven across. So my guess is that considering the width of this airplane, V Australia could fit more seats in the same amount of space.

The other issue is probably the weight. The herringbone design is a fairly heavy one and requires heavy equipment to make it possible. Flying ultra long haul routes like LA to Melbourne means they might not be able to handle the extra weight if they want to fly with a full load.

The seats they’ve chosen are good, but they aren’t the best around. For that reasons, there had to be some pretty important reasons for them not to go with the best seats out there.