How We Publish Open Premium-Cabin Data — BTS T-100, DOT ATCR, and the Methodology Behind It

Five open dashboards, six corridor deep-dives, two editorial reports, one downloadable CSV, and one live tracker. The dashboards live at /data; the long-form reports live at /reports. The dashboards are tabular and aggregation-heavy — useful for journalists, analysts, sourcing teams, and anyone reasoning about premium-cabin route economics. The reports are written for human readers and frame the same data with editorial context. Every page shares one thing: the underlying inputs are public, the joins are documented, and a flat-file CSV is available to verify or re-aggregate any figure shown.

The programme is not a marketing exercise. It exists because the working data behind premium-cabin booking decisions is genuinely useful — to us internally for sourcing analysis and codeshare planning, to journalists writing about the long-haul market, and to analysts tracking corridor concentration over time. Publishing it openly means our public claims are auditable against the same data they are derived from.

BTS T-100 Segment is the backbone. It is the U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics segment-level traffic dataset — every U.S.-touching scheduled flight by reporting carrier and month, with passenger counts, scheduled and performed flights, and the aircraft type the carrier reported flying. T-100 is public domain (CC0), refreshed quarterly with a 3-4 month lag, and the canonical source for this kind of analysis. We download the quarterly release, normalize it, and check the result into the repository so build time never depends on the upstream endpoint.

DOT Air Travel Consumer Report (ATCR) is the on-time-performance overlay. ATCR publishes monthly carrier-level on-time arrival, cancellation, mishandled-baggage and complaint rates for U.S.-reporting carriers. We use the rolling-12-month figures from the most recent release as the OTP layer, joined to the T-100 traffic at the route-carrier level. ATCR is similarly public domain.

State.gov travel advisories and GOV.UK foreign travel advice are the destination-risk overlay. State.gov publishes a 1-4 advisory level per country plus a written summary; GOV.UK publishes a separate (and often differently-framed) advisory under the Open Government Licence. We refresh both quarterly and surface the freshness signal on every travel-requirements page so readers can see when each underlying record was last updated by the source.

Our consolidator route catalog is the self-published input. It contains the lowest accessed business-class consolidator fare per route in our contract network, refreshed continuously. This is the only non-government input on the data hub, and it is the column that gives the joined dataset its booking relevance — BTS tells you the route is dense; the fare floor tells you what premium-cabin pricing actually looks like on it today.

Every dataset on the hub is keyed on a normalized route slug — origin city and destination city in lowercase, hyphenated, with -to- between (e.g. new-york-to-london). When a route appears in BTS T-100 but not in our consolidator catalog, the traffic columns populate and the fare-floor columns are blank. When a route is in our catalog but not in our BTS T-100 ingestion, only the consolidator-fare columns populate and the row is excluded from the headline rollups. The join is the natural inner join when both sides exist, and the natural outer join when one side is missing — never imputed.

Carrier names are normalized to the BTS reporting form (e.g. American Airlines Inc.) before aggregation. We do not collapse JV-shared metal into a single brand — Delta and KLM appear as separate carriers on shared transatlantic routes even though they operate as a single revenue entity. Aircraft type strings are similarly normalized but not collapsed — 777-300ER and 777-200ER stay distinct. Both choices are deliberate: aggregation hides nuance, and the audience for this data wants the nuance.

The airfare and traffic dashboard at /data/airfare-trends is the headline product. Six metric cards sit above five tables — top routes by passenger volume, corridor breakdown, carrier concentration buckets, seasonality, and lowest long-haul consolidator floors. The downloadable CSV at /data/airfare-trends/data.csv is the same data in flat-file form; it is the source of every figure on every other dashboard.

The carrier leaderboard at /data/carrier-leaderboard ranks every reporting carrier in the BTS sample by routes-led — the count of routes where the carrier holds the largest reporting share. It is not a market-share or revenue claim; it is the count, with a corridor-split column that surfaces regional concentration patterns. The aircraft deployment table at /data/aircraft-deployment does the same thing for aircraft types — every type ranked by the number of distinct routes it appears on, with operator breakouts for the top types.

The seasonality dashboard at /data/seasonality extends the seasonality table on the main dashboard with per-corridor breakdown plus example routes for the busiest peak and trough months. The corridor deep-dives at /data/corridor/[slug] (transatlantic, transpacific, US-Middle East, US-Oceania, US Domestic, Middle East-Asia) slice every aggregation to a single corridor and re-run them in scope.

The State of the Premium Cabin quarterly report at /reports/state-of-premium-cabin-2026-q2 is the long-form read of the same dataset, narrowed to the long-haul (≥7 hour) subset. Six findings in the executive summary, seven analytical sections covering corridor demand, concentration, carrier leadership, fleet, on-time performance, and the travel-advisory environment, then five booking implications for travelers. Quarterly editions ship at permanent URLs — Q3 will land at a new URL when the next BTS release ships, with Q2 staying live and stable for citation.

The aircraft retrofit tracker at /reports/aircraft-retrofit-tracker is the live companion. Twelve major premium-cabin retrofit programmes — Allegris, Club Suite, Polaris, Delta One Suites, La Première, Qsuite, the new Singapore Airlines and Emirates programmes, Cathay Aria, JAL A350, Project Sunrise, ANA — each with status, first service date, completion target, booking implication, and per-row click-through to a carrier press release or trade-press source. Status updates in place when carrier announcements change.

For sourcing analysis, the carrier leaderboard plus the corridor deep-dive for your route's corridor is usually enough. Routes-led plus corridor split tells you which carriers are deep in the corridor and which are passing through. For codeshare planning, look for carriers with high routes-led in one corridor and zero or near-zero in an adjacent corridor — they have demonstrable distribution and capacity but no metal in the gap, which is the natural codeshare conversation.

For booking strategy on a specific route, the airfare-trends dashboard top-routes table plus the relevant corridor deep-dive surfaces carrier mix and seasonality patterns. The cheapest-month rollup on each route page takes the seasonality data one level deeper and projects it onto the consolidator floor. For award-redemption planning, the carrier leadership tables flag carriers worth knowing on miles even if you would not pay cash on the corridor.

For citation, every figure on the hub is reproducible from the linked public-domain sources. We ask that citations name BTS for the upstream traffic data and BookMyBusinessClass for the joined view. We do not ask for permission — the dataset is free to use with attribution.

The State of the Premium Cabin Q3 2026 edition will ship when the next BTS T-100 release lands — typically late summer. The annual edition will follow at year end. The aircraft retrofit tracker continues to update in place as carriers ship new equipment.

Two adjacent trackers are in the queue. The codeshare and joint-venture map will document the alliance and JV relationships that shape long-haul itinerary construction — useful for understanding why a flight booked on one carrier ends up on another carrier's metal. The loyalty programme devaluation tracker will document material changes to the major frequent-flyer programmes, with date-stamped before/after award values per change. Both will follow the same publishing rules as the existing trackers: one URL per item, click-through source per row, last-verified date refreshed when the underlying record changes.

The methodology behind everything we publish is documented at /editorial-standards. The data programme is one expression of that standard — open inputs, attributable joins, click-through citations, and a flat-file download for any reader who wants to verify the figures themselves.