Perhaps it’s the natural human inclination toward nosiness, but people are always interested in what others are and aren’t buying. Those purchases always invite some kind of judgment, comparison, envy, desire to stay on trend, or some combination of all of the above. What people buy is often a reflection of a bigger picture about how we live and the things we find important.
And one thing that Americans really buy is a window seat.
This past month, Delta Air Lines announced that it closed 2025 with a $5 billion profit and is expecting to see a 5 percent growth in revenue in early 2026. One of the main drivers, according to the airline, was a “growing demand for our premium products.” The revenue for premium products grew 7 percent compared to 2025, and they generated more revenue than main cabin tickets in the final three months of the year. Rival airline United also announced that it had beat earnings expectations and, similarly, that its premium revenue was up 9 percent year over year.
As a person who spent a tiny fortune flying a few times last year, it’s not really a surprise to see airlines report that they had successfully taken my money. What’s annoying, if entertaining, though, is watching their generous use of words like “premium” and “upgrade” to refer to things like being able to pick a seat when you buy your ticket, selecting an aforementioned window seat, checking bags, and getting full credit with cancellation — up-charges that were, once upon a time, all part of regular, non-“premium” air travel.
Avoiding boarding with Zone 8 and not sitting nose-distance from a toilet for the entirety of the flight are now, allegedly, luxury experiences that we have all bought into. And with our money in their hands, airlines are promising (threatening?) to think of more ways to add premium features to our flights.
Great.
In an attempt to sift through the corporatese and complain about the current state of air travel, I spoke to experts about what this premium-speak all means and where all these up-charges seem to be headed. What I am sorry to report is that airlines have gotten really good at making us pay for things that used to be free, and that many of us can’t help but buy in.
How airlines beat customers at their own game
One thing I learned from speaking to business school professors about airlines is that airline pricing is one thing that business school professors enthusiastically examine. When consumers like me complain but still pay more for window seats and to board in a manner that doesn’t feel like one of those dystopian YA novels where children from varying districts rush in and bludgeon each other to death, business experts see it as a case study.
They want to know how, if consumers bemoan these up-charges so much, airlines still get away with it. They want to look at what a company like Delta does with the tremendous amount of consumer information (demand, price points, sunk costs, etc.) at its disposal.
“Airline pricing is a classic case that we teach in our core microeconomics courses in the MBA program and at most business schools,” Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia Business School, told me. “There is a great deal of flexibility to segment and version and unbundle the flying experience. And airlines are able to collect data on consumers’ responsiveness to those moves in ways that allow them to optimize that for their revenue and profit.”
There are very few businesses, if any, that can modify their services and pinpoint them to consumer price points as well as airlines can. From being able to look at seat maps to shilling loyalty credit cards, legacy carriers are very good at making consumers think about purchasing as a competition. I joked to House about paying a charge to be able to use the restroom on a plane, and he assured me that it’s probably already been gamed out, and that the theoretical sanitary mess would be a loss for airlines. Still, the airlines are often willing to sacrifice customer comfort for a few extra bucks.
“But the narrowing of pitch between seats — [i.e.,] the compression of a few extra rows into planes — has been something that was thought was beyond the pale some years ago and has become increasingly normal today,” House said.
Initially, offering a basic service fare with subsequent up-charges was a tactic that the US’s legacy airlines — Delta, American, and United Airlines — used to compete with discount airlines like Southwest. What’s emerged is that the majors have boosted and expanded their ancillary fees, and those fees have now become an integral part of their revenue streams.
“It’s turned out that competition has led to this situation where the airlines can make more money by unbundling everything,” Marvin Lieberman, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, told Vox. “The airlines have essentially figured out what people are willing to pay for.”
Lieberman, who is currently writing a book about Southwest Airlines, explained that, despite the groans and moans of flyers, flying is actually cheaper (taking inflation into account) than it was decades ago.
That was a surprise to me, a person who feels like he’s constantly paying more and more for Delta Comfort. But Lieberman and other experts noted that, back in the day, when flying was a luxury, only the very rich could afford it. Now that flying has been democratized on such a massive scale, you could look at these fees and charges as giving greater access to people who don’t care about sitting in middle seats, don’t mind the shorter legroom, and are not picky about sitting near the toilets in the back of the plane. For the rest of us, airlines have figured out exactly what we’re willing to pay for.
“If you’re not willing to pay their premium, you don’t buy it,” he added.
Why “premium” doesn’t feel like premium
In my world, words matter. Using words like “premium” and “upgrade” to describe things that were once bundled as part of the air travel experience feels like a mild fraud. There’s nothing premium or special about buying things that were already given to us.
“You’re not wrong,” says Charles Lindsey, a consumer behavior professor at the School of Management at SUNY-Buffalo. “Legacy carriers really have figured the market out to a certain extent — especially when they all kind of align their business models similarly.”
Lindsey explained that airlines have essentially morphed into what’s known colloquially in economics as “legal price discrimination.” They allow consumers to self-select into different pricing levels on what’s ostensibly the same good (a flight) based on the experience they want. Unbundling seats and services has created this dynamic. And because those legacy carriers dominate air travel in the US, and because they’re all modeled pretty similarly, the power of choice isn’t really on consumers’ sides.
Despite all those up-charges and the corporate promise of more premiums, Lindsey gives the airlines a tiny benefit of the doubt. He says that the carriers just might try to figure out what customers aren’t receiving and improve on it. That could be on the service side or the product design side, in coach, business, or first class.
But, more likely, he says, they’re probably thinking: “Is there anything that consumers don’t have to pay for now that we should start charging for?”
I suppose I’d be less annoyed if I wasn’t a stickler for semantics and if the “premium” I pay for were reflected in some kind of pronounced quality. But in this model, there’s really no incentive for airlines to improve an air travel experience if people are already willing to pay more for things they took for granted before.
In fact, it seems like making air travel as awful as possible — e.g., making seat pitches smaller, making boarding more horrendous, making people wait longer for checked baggage, not reimbursing fliers for delays — is the more sound business strategy. In a world where they’re all doing it, it all works in any given airline’s favor. Carriers don’t need to sell more first class tickets to make money; they just need to sell more seats that aren’t the worst.
There have always been people who will pay whatever amount to enjoy luxury airline service. What carriers have keenly figured out is how to get their regular customers to use their money on “upgrades.” Whether that’s unbundling all the facets of buying a seat or capitalizing on people’s distaste for sitting near the restrooms, it all translates to more dollars being spent. And whatever one receives in return, airlines would call that a premium.
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