Budget Is Dead. Long Live Premium? The demise of Spirit Airlines has provided endless fodder for late-night comedy that pokes fun at the misery of budget airline travel in the United States. But what about the other end of the spectrum? Do legacy carriers merely move people through the sky, or can they lay claim to a premium offering that genuinely earns preference and loyalty among flyers? A proxy for premiumness is a company’s ability to command a price premium. One quick test is to compare a company’s share of category revenue with its share of category profit. I ran a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the top three US carriers, and the results are stark (see the chart below): Delta, United, and American each account for roughly a third of their combined operating revenue — they occupy similar positions on the horizontal axis.…