Business class is becoming increasingly more luxurious, spacious and private. Whether it’s custom-designed seat and bed cushions, bespoke fittings and fixtures, or co-branding with some of the biggest names in luxury, business really is the new first class aboard many planes.
That’s especially true in business class mini-suites with doors, which debuted nearly 10 years ago aboard JetBlue’s Mint premium airplanes, and are now found on a dozen or so carriers including Delta, All Nippon Airways, British Airways and China Eastern, with more rolling out every year.
Doors make the business class experience better in two ways: first, they add privacy, and second, they avoid what airplane seat designers call the “brush past,” where a passenger or crew member walking down the aisle bumps into a seated passenger.
If you’ve traveled in business class, you might already be thinking of some of the seats where that would be particularly beneficial.
One might be the several kinds of staggered layouts where some seats are right next to the aisle, but others are well away from the aisle, on the other side of a little console table. Another might be the angled herringbone layout where seats face into the aisle and you end up having to avoid eye contact with the person opposite for the whole flight.
Doors obviously help to avoid that. But while these mini-suites with doors are more private than many first class seats, the word “mini” is in their name for a reason: the space for each passenger is, while massive compared with economy, still smaller than first class.