Tim Stehly paid for Delta's best seat this fall. He's a retired IBM executive, and he'd flown Emirates and Singapore Airlines up front before. The JFK lounge was great. Then he boarded. The pod was drab, the screen was tiny, and there was no door. "It was not comfortable by any stretch," he told the Journal.
Dawn Gilbertson's Carry On column explains the gap. Stehly flew to Shannon, Ireland, on a Boeing 767. Those are the oldest jets in Delta's fleet, and some have flown more than 30 years. Delta plans to retire them over the next several years, and it won't refit them with the new suites. The suites go on new Airbus A350s that start arriving next summer, and on refitted A330s. The old 767s get the new menu and the Missoni bedding. A recent Reddit post about a Berlin to JFK flight on one called it a “very sad plane.”
It isn't just Delta. Alaska Airlines showed off new business suites and lounges in Seattle this fall. The suites don't arrive until 2028. Its first business-class lounge, the Aurora in Seattle, opens in late 2027 at the earliest. Southwest said it'd be the first big U.S. airline with Starlink Wi-Fi on every plane by the end of 2027. Hours later, the Wi-Fi was out on Gilbertson's Dallas to Phoenix flight. United won't have Starlink fleetwide until the end of 2027 either, so it built a tracker that shows which flights have it.
Check the plane, not the ad
Delta's Mauricio Parise says the airline will add better pictures to its Delta One booking page in December. “What we don't want to do is to depict something that doesn't exist,” he says. Until then, the work is on you. Airlines list the aircraft type when you book. Seat maps on the AeroLOPA site show what that plane really has. A last-minute plane swap can still happen. But the aircraft type is a good place to start.
Our read
Cash Flow, M5. A premium seat can be one of the biggest single splurges in a retiree's travel budget, and it's bought on a picture. The picture is often of a cabin that isn't flying yet. The ads run about two years ahead of the planes, and that gap is where the letdown lives. We watch the same gap in money products. The brochure shows the best case. The contract shows what you get.
Here's where it touches your plan. If you've got a big trip booked for the holidays or next year, pull up the confirmation this week and find the aircraft type. Check that plane's seat map on AeroLOPA before you pay for an upgrade. Then look at the travel line in your retirement budget. If you set it years ago, the dollar bought more back then. If the number hasn't changed, it's a 767 in a world of A350s. Bring the real number to your next review, and we'll fit it to the rest of the plan.