The World is Flat

Let's face it - when it comes to travelling on business, it's all about flying IN business.

And when flying in business, Flat rules the world.

If you're lucky enough to be working for a company that still values your time, sanity and overall well-being, then hopefully you're still flying business class and having a good chance of getting some rest on a long flight.

But if you're dealing with a company that thinks that travel is a perk or a necessary evil of doing business, then you may just have to resign yourself to sitting in misery at the back of the bus.

Unless...dare I say it...you're willing to fly a Low Cost Carrier?

Air Asia announced this week that they're now offering flat bed seats in their "premium" section, which will be rolling out on many routes in the coming months. Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur is already showing availability of the lie-flat seats, with some pretty incredible fares. A return fare for later this month came up at only AU$1454 whereas a quick search on Webjet to compare other carriers found the cheapest business class fare was on Emirates and at nearly double the price of Air Asia. A search of Economy fares showed on average about a $400-500 difference. Not altogether a large amount if you need to step right off a flight into a meeting.

Which will all make for interesting debates in corporations who've reacted to the GFC by slashing travel costs at any cost, and traveller comfort and productivity be damned. However many companies will then ask their travel buyers to still negotiate with the same carriers to get better Economy or Premium Economy fares rather than business class. And travellers will likely start revolting if they see they can get a lie-flat seat on a Low-Cost Carrier at a price relatively similar to the Economy Class fare their company likely negotiated with a mainline carrier.

This could be bad news for travel managers trying to maintain a program whilst having unhappy travellers relegated out of premium products. And to make matters worse, the route coverage Air Asia is touting is a pretty good lineup of regional Asia Pacific business destinations: Melbourne, Gold Coast (well, at least for meetings anyway) Perth, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Chengdu, Mumbai and New Delhi. And if you're willing to buy two separate tickets from Melbourne to London-Stansted, you can do that too as KUL-STN will be serviced by the flat beds as well.

So, business travellers may be sleeping better, but perhaps not so much travel managers trying to make sense of all this.