Alaska Air Group is expanding premium seating across its airlines, joining an industry-wide push to capture more revenue from travelers willing to pay extra for comfort.
The company, which operates Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, said Tuesday that both carriers will introduce premium-economy cabins beginning in 2028. Alaska and Hawaiian will also add more lie-flat seats as part of broader aircraft interior upgrades.
Alaska’s Boeing 787 Dreamliners will be fitted with 34 lie-flat business-class suites. The aircraft will also receive a 35-seat premium-economy cabin, which Alaska plans to install on select Boeing 737 MAX 10 aircraft as well.
The premium-economy seats will have 38 inches of pitch, or the distance between a seat and the same point on the seat in front of it, as well as additional recline and leg and calf rests.
At least 25 Boeing 737 MAX 10 aircraft will also have 12 lie-flat seats for select transcontinental routes. It will be the first time Alaska has offered lie-flat seating on its narrowbody aircraft.
Hawaiian, meanwhile, plans to overhaul the interiors of its 24 Airbus A330 aircraft. Each plane is expected to have 22 lie-flat seats and 28 premium-economy seats.
“We believe premium is more than a seat,” Alaska Air Group CEO Ben Minicucci said in a statement. “It’s how guests feel from the moment they book their trip to the moment they arrive at the airport to when they’re in the air with us.”
The investment extends beyond aircraft cabins. Alaska plans a nearly 41,000-square-foot lounge complex in Seattle, including a separate lounge for international premium passengers. Hawaiian is preparing a roughly 13,000-square-foot lounge in Honolulu that is scheduled to open in early 2028.
The expansion is part of Alaska Air Group’s broader transformation following its roughly $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines in 2024. The deal gave Alaska access to Hawaiian’s widebody fleet and larger network across the Pacific.
Alaska has since laid out plans to expand long-haul international service from Seattle, with a goal of serving at least 15 intercontinental destinations from the city by 2030.
Premium travel is also becoming more important to the company financially. Alaska Air Group expects premium revenue to account for more than 40 percent of its total revenue by 2030, up from a projected 36 percent this year.
The strategy mirrors a broader shift among major U.S. airlines, which are increasingly betting on selling fewer seats at higher yields rather than packing planes more densely with standard economy passengers.
According to advisory firm Visual Approach Analytics, the number of scheduled first- and business-class seats on domestic flights grew by 14 percent between 2019 and 2024, more than three times the 4 percent growth recorded for scheduled economy seats.
American Airlines posted the largest overall increase in domestic first- and business-class seats during that period, followed by United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.
Those figures do not account for premium economy, an intermediate class that became a standard offering for many major airlines in the 2010s.
