My very first blog post was about my experience with Internet and phone service on planes, and its early disappearance. Now inflight Internet service is reappearing, at least in US domestic routes. The point I was making there was that airlines are experts at pricing airline tickets, maximizing yield. However, they couldn’t figure out how to price and market telephone and Internet service inflight. Well, it seems like not much has changed, at least on some airlines.

I travel quite a bit, mostly on Continental (now in the process of merging with United) – which I mostly enjoy. This morning I boarded an early morning coast-to-coast Continental flight of over 5 hours (and I was not upgraded). Each seat, even in economy, had a nice-looking entertainment system with over 90 channels of DirecTV satellite TV as well as several movie channels and more. The passenger sitting next to me commented upon arriving at his seat and seeing the system: “now that’s the way to fly!” Little did he know…

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