Our first batch of business class reviews is posted, featuring 94 reviews from 10 sites and 17 airlines. This is an opportunity to look at how the different airlines compared to each other, and other interesting alpha business class reviews analytics. Note that this is a limited data set, and these analytics are more for fun than definitive truth. As the data in our systems expands more meaningful insights can – and will – be drawn in the future.
General Business First Class Reviews Analytics
The newest review was February 28 2019, and the oldest October 3 2013. Overall the level of detail of reviews was fairly good, scoring an average of 2.29/3.00. This gives us reasonable confidence in the data – not as good as the first class data, but not bad. The lowest level of detail was 1.80/3.00 (ANA), and the highest 2.80/3.00 (Lufthansa). 38 reviews came from The Points Guy, 18 from One Mile at a Time, 13 from Travel Codex, 12 from Live and Let’s Fly, 4 from Travel Skills, 4 from Sam Chui, 3 from Travel Update, 2 from Thrifty Traveler and Turning Left for Less, and 1 each from Frugal First-Class Travel and Million Mile Secrets. This largely is reflective bias from Premium Travel Insider in our alpha collections as we favor some of the bigger sites. The beta release in a few months will have more viewpoint diversity.
Quality of Flight Analytics
The average overall flight experience rating of 2.46/3.00 is relatively close to the “Big 5” average of 2.32/3.00. Average overall ratings spanned from 2.17/3.00 (Swiss) to 2.92/3.00 (EVA). A similar spread existed for average “Big 5” – the lowest at 1.99/3.00 (Swiss) to 2.77/3.00 (Qatar). From an “overall experience” standpoint, there are some interesting conclusions. Although there were not “bad” ratings, there were definitely winners and losers. About half of the airlines scored a 2.50 overall or higher – indicating at least a great experience. Those airlines are clearly the ones you’d want to fly. However, the story gets more complex when we look at “Big 5” averages.
Big 5 Analytics
Business class was notable as there were some significant standard deviation variations across Big 5 characteristics. This intuitively appears to be explained simply by the fact that some business classes are notably better than others according to reviewers. Standard deviation is captured below:
| Big 5 Average Standard Deviation | .19 |
| Seat Standard Deviation | .33 |
| IFE Standard Deviation | .36 |
| Food Standard Deviation | .34 |
| Drink Standard Deviation | .31 |
| Service Standard Deviation | .29 |
Every category had .29 deviation or higher, indicating a meaningful difference in products. The good news is that there were no truly below average experiences in the selected business classes. It will be interesting to see if this stays true as other business class carriers are added, particularly those carriers in areas which often have a poor reputation among reviewers, notably China and Latin America.
The standard deviations capture what we see qualitatively – for example, the very high of 2.80/3.00 (Qatar) for the Q-Suite compared to the lowly ranked seats at 1.60/3.00 and 1.67/3.00 (Lufthansa and Turkish). Food had a similar spread, ranging from the superb 3.00/3.00 (Turkish, EVA, Air France) to the acceptable at 2.00 / 3.00 (Delta and Cathay Pacific). Drink programs similarly ranged from the best at a 3.00/3.00 (Qatar), to several with 2.00/3.00 on the low end. This indicates that airlines knew how to put out an acceptable drink product and no one was really going the cheap route. IFE had a 2.75/3.00 leading the pack (Qatar), with a lowly 1.60/3.00 (Japan Airlines) bringing up the rear. Finally, for service, a perfect 3.00/3.00 (EVA) took the top with a below average 1.80/3.00 (Swiss) in last place.
Alpha Business Class Reviews Analytics Summary
The good news for business class options covered in our first data set is that there aren’t any poor choices. The bad news is that there are some fairly significant deviations to be found in business class quality. If particular aspects of a flight are meaningful to you, do the research. Overall experiences can be rated in a positive fashion – such as Japan Airlines, with a 2.20/3.00 overall and a 2.33/3.00 Big 5 – but a 1.60/3.00 for IFE is hiding in that experience. Flyers should ensure they are researching business class reviews prior to booking to make sure you’re getting the best value possible.