Spare a Thought for the Economy Flyer

This past summer, a friend of mine spent a month road-tripping through the Balkans with a group of hippies. By the end, exasperated by their bohemian ways and fed up with sleeping in a series of ever-saggier hammocks, he booked himself a business-class flight home — his first.

“I feel like I’m high right now,” he texted me, along with a photo of a glass of welcome champagne from his roomy lie-flat seat on the Polish airline LOT. “There is something trippy about taking what’s normally terrible and making it kind of amazing,” I replied.

Thanks to my prior life as a magazine editor who frequently travelled for work, I’m no stranger to business class, and my unabashed love of it is one of my more insufferable qualities. I’ve been that person: smugly perusing the oversized paper menu, debating between the green-curry sablefish and the braised short rib, while an endless line of fellow passengers shuffled past me to the other side of the curtain. I’ve also been the person doing the shuffling, ruefully looking at the pristine pods while thinking, “I’ll be back someday, you’ll see!” It’s hard not to yearn for a spot in the front of the plane — especially when it feels like airlines are increasingly courting the premium passenger.