Image Is Earned per Class

Passengers judge comfort and service against what their own cabin expects, and some will not consider your product at all. Standing with economy travellers buys nothing in the business cabin.

Passengers in PlaneSim are not interchangeable, and neither is their approval. Comfort and on-board service are judged against what each cabin class expects, some traveler types only consider certain classes at all, and premium passengers hold you to a higher service standard. The practical consequence is blunt: a product that satisfies your economy cabin has earned you nothing in business, because business is graded on a different scale.

Service is a route decision

On-board service is set per airport pair, in the same settings block as your fares, on a scale from None to Premium. It costs you per passenger per hour of flight, and passengers weigh it against their class's expectations. The wiki's pricing reference puts it plainly: skimping in business class hurts more than skimping in economy. The identical service level can read as adequate in one cabin and as a defect in the other, because the standard being missed is not the same standard.

Comfort is bought by the hour

Comfort is valued per hour aboard. A business seat is worth far more to its buyer on a ten-hour sector than on a one-hour hop, and the Cabins page includes a comfort-by-distance view to help judge where premium space pays. This makes premium cabins a network decision as much as an interiors decision: the layout that earns its keep on long sectors is dead floor space on short ones.

There is a harder edge to the same system. Some traveler types simply do not consider certain classes, so no fare and no service budget will put your option in front of a passenger whose type will not look at the cabin you are selling. That demand is not unconvinced; it is absent.

The floor-space ledger

Premium standing is paid for in floor area before it is paid for in service.

Both columns are world settings, so your world may differ, but the shape holds: a first seat takes four times the floor of an economy seat by default, and every aircraft type has a fixed floor-space budget, so each premium seat you add costs more than one economy seat elsewhere. Factory-fresh aircraft arrive in a dense all-economy layout, one economy seat per unit of floor space, which makes reconfiguration the usual first move on a premium-minded network. Second-hand and leased tails keep whatever layout they already wear, and larger lessor metal often arrives with a business cabin already fitted, so check before you plan a refit.

On most worlds a refit is instant and free, and the aircraft stays in service. Worlds with refit windows make it a real project instead: seats billed as hardware, the tail grounded for the work, overlapping flights cancelled with compensation. The Cabins page warns you which kind of world you are in before you commit.

What the market grades

When the booking model weighs an option, cabin comfort, on-board service measured against class expectations, and the airline's image all sit in the scale alongside fare and schedule. The judgment is made by a specific traveler type considering a specific cabin on a specific journey. A dense, cheap, no-service operation can be exactly right for budget travellers and still offer nothing a first-class passenger recognizes as a product: the expectations differ, and so does the set of cabins that passenger will consider at all.

Premium standing is therefore not inherited from volume elsewhere in the aircraft. It is assembled: floor space given up, a service level paid for by the hour, sectors long enough for comfort to justify the fare, and the class present on every leg of the journey, since a cabin is only offered when it exists the whole way through. The mechanics are laid out in Pricing & fares and Cabins on the wiki.