All Nippon Airways’ (ANA) Airbus A380 superjumbos will feature an economy class couch product, paired business class seats for honeymooners and a multi-purpose room where mothers can attend to their babies and passengers can get changed.

The A380s will be introduced on ANA’s Tokyo-Honolulu services in the 2019 northern spring and feature special liveries featuring a Hawaiian green sea turtle, a symbol of luck and prosperity in the islands.

About 1.5 million Japanese travel to Hawaii annually and ANA will be the first Japanese carrier to operate A380s. It plans to use the big plane to increase its share of the lucrative market.

READ our ratings for ANA

The new livery will come in three colors: blue, representing the Hawaiian sky; emerald green, inspired by the seas around the islands; and orange, representing the Hawaiian sunset.

The superjumbo will be configured with eight first class seats, 56 in business, 73 in premium economy and 389 in economy. All classes will have bar counters.

This is the first time the airline has offered first class to Hawaii and each seat will have its own door to enhance privacy.

ANA says business class is a popular option for honeymooners and families.

“Therefore, compared to other aircraft where seats are staggered, this revolutionary business class offers pairs of seats, allowing passengers to enjoy and share their exciting travel experience sitting next to each other while still keeping all seats with aisle access,’’ the airline said in its announcement.

The 389 economy seats on the main deck will include 60 couch seats, another first for a Japanese carrier and similar to the seats pioneered by Air New Zealand.

Each couch is comprised of three of four seats where passengers are able to fold up the leg rests and lie down. They also receive a dedicated mattress and the airline expects it to be particularly popular with passengers traveling with small children.

“The cabin interiors have also been strategically designed in order for the passengers to feel the spirit of Hawaii from the moment they board the aircraft,’’ ANA said. “The walls and lights have been arranged in such a way as to illustrate Hawaii’s enviable blue skies, sunrises, sunsets, night skies and iconic rainbows.”

Gulf carrier Emirates has taken off-airport check-in to a new level with a mobile service that comes to passengers’ homes.

The service comes as a number of airlines have been experimenting with hotel check-ins and Antipodean carrier Virgin Australia has been pioneering “pop-up” facilities in areas such as cruise terminals.

Emirates passengers in Dubai can now have a mobile check-in agent and security staffer come to their house to issue a boarding pass and collect their luggage. The service is also available for people staying in hotels.

It isn’t free and at AED350 ($US95) per trip, it isn’t cheap.

But it’s available to people flying all classes and the price includes up to seven pieces of luggage. This means passengers need only transport themselves to the airport where they can go directly to immigration.

WATCH: Emirates superjumbo creates a snowy blast.

“Emirates has been running trials for its Home Check-in service since October to ensure that the customer experience and security checks are faultless,’’ the airline said. “The service seals each bag and stores them in a separate hold in the van. Emirates Home Check-in will be operated with a new fleet of vans. “

Passengers can book the Home Check-In just after buying their ticket or up to 12 hours prior to departure from Dubai.

They pay an extra AED35 for each additional piece of baggage beyond the seven pieces and they can pay excess baggage fees through the service if their luggage is overweight.

Virgin Australia’s cutting-edge off-terminal service has been offering cruise passengers connecting to its flights the ability to check in after ships berth at two cruise terminals in Sydney.

The service, created by Off Airport Check-In Solutions (OACIS) using Amadeus’ Airport Common Use Service cloud technology, allows passengers disembarking from a cruise to drop their bags, pick up their boarding pass and explore Sydney bag-free.

READ: Trans-Tasman competition heats up as VIrgin adds routes and capacity.

The Australian carrier recently used the technology at a tourism conference in Adelaide, where it proved a big hit with attendees, and plans to expand its use to other conferences and hotels.

In addition to providing passenger convenience, Virgin says the service also helps ease airport congestion by allowing passengers to go straight to their flight.

United Airlines has unveiled the first of four new Polaris Lounges to be opened in 2018 with the launch of a 440-seat facility at San Francisco International  Airport.

The two-level, 28,000-square feet (2601 sq.m) international lounge comes is part of United’s big push to upgrade its business class to the new standard.

Polaris was launched two years ago with lie-flat seats and revamped in-flight service but there has been frustration for passengers because of its limited roll-out. Only 24 aircraft have the new seat —  a mix of new Boeing 777-300s and retrofitted older planes.

But United is moving to fix that by planning to roll out, on average, one aircraft sporting Polaris every 10 days through to 2020.

Also coming are new Polaris lounges at Newark Liberty International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental in Houston and Los Angeles International Airport. Newark is due to open in June, Houston during the US summer and LA in fall.

The new lounge will be available to departing and arriving United Polaris customers and is located in the international terminal near Gate G92.

The carrier says the San Francisco lounge incorporates “thoughtful California touches”, including art by prominent artists from the region, and will feature food and beverages showcasing the Bay area.

It features 19 different types of seating, five private daybeds with Saks Fifth Avenue bedding and eight luxury shower suites with Soho House & Co.’s spa products.

For those arriving with wrinkled clothes, there are personal valet services that include steaming of garments.

“The Dining Room” is a private restaurant-style dining area with a menu designed by Californian chef Tritia Gestuvo. It blends international comfort foods such as traditional Chinese congee breakfast and hand-cut pappardelle pasta with mushroom ragout with staples such as the United Polaris burger.

There is also a bistro-like buffet that includes a ramen noodle bar in the afternoon.

Beverages include cocktails inspired by the Bay area. This includes the Mai Tai, which travelers may be surprised to learn was invented in Oakland in 1944, and the Pisco Punch, which features a South American brandy that became popular in the area during the California Gold Rush in 1849.

United has also announced that all Polaris seats will get a cooling gel pillow from July 1. The pillow was previously available on request but proved so popular the airline has made it a standard offering.

READ: United expands free entertainment to more jets.

The downside of the Polaris fit-out is United will move to 10-across economy seating in its international Boeing 777-200s.

Australia’s competition regulator remains worried that limited regulation of the nation’s four big monopoly airports results in big profits that push up airfares.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission annual review of Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney airports found that all significantly boosted operating profits from aeronautical activities in 2016-17 to a combined $A757.6 million.

That was up 9.9 percent in real terms from 2015-16, with Sydney Airport alone earning $360.8 million, the commission said.

Sydney Airport earned $18.30 per passenger in aeronautical revenue (up 4.4 percent) while revenue per passenger at Perth Airport grew by 7.2 percent to $15.80.

Profit margins for aeronautical services ranged from 34.9 percent in Perth to 46.8 percent in Brisbane.

Even with alternatives such as online booking, profit margins for parking also remained high and ranged from 52.4 percent for Perth Airport to 71.9 percent at Sydney Airport in 2016-17.

“It is not surprising that the airports are so profitable, given that they face little competitive pressure and no price regulation,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said. “Profits per passenger have also risen at each of the four airports and travelers are paying for this through higher ticket prices.

“We remain concerned that the current regulatory regime, which is limited to monitoring the covered airports, doesn’t constrain the market power of four of Australia’s major airports.

“Unconstrained monopolies often have an incentive and ability to charge excessive prices while lacking strong incentives to improve services.”

READ: Changi Airport fees to produce fare rises of up to 25 percent, says Jetstar CEO.

Sims’ comments come as the federal government is expected to ask the Productivity Commission to review the economic regulation of airports for the first time since 2011.

Airlines have already beefed up their lobbying efforts with a trans-Tasman industry group, Airlines for Australia and New Zealand, and are expected to call for greater regulation.

The competition watchdog, which has raised concerns about airports’ market power in the past, will also put in a submission. It believes a key issue will be the cost and benefit of regulations to constrain the airports’ marketing power in aeronautical and car parking services.

But airports will fight to retain the light-handed regulatory approach adopted by the Howard Government and supported by successive governments.

The Australian Airports Association hit back at the claim profits were boosting airfares, describing the observation as “peculiar” and noting the ACCC report contained no data on the fares.

AAA chief economist Warren Mundy said the Board of Airline Representatives of Australia recently reported that international airfares fell in real terms by about 40 percent while government statistics showed domestic airfares declined in real terms for a decade until last year.

“These facts are consistent with the 2011 finding of the Productivity Commission, namely that even if increases in airport charges are passed on to passengers they are unlikely to significantly impact on ticket prices paid by customers,” Mundy said.

“Airport charges have risen to fund investment and these charges, along with the investments, have been determined by negotiation between airports and airlines.

“These investments have created the infrastructure capacity necessary for Australian airlines to grow and international carriers to enter the market. That’s why ticket prices have fallen, not increased as suggested by Mr Sims.”

Mundy also noted that the preferred profit measure used by the Productivity Commission, return on assets, was shown in the ACCC report to be lower now than in 2013 at each of the big four airports.

Despite the ACCC’s concerns, service quality at the four airports was rated either satisfactory or good in a combined score that used passenger and airline feedback as well as objective indicators.

Passenger tended to rate the airports more highly than airlines, with all four airports categorized as good. Perth was the only airport ranked as good by the airlines.

Perth overtook Brisbane to record the highest quality overall rating for the four airports while Sydney and Melbourne were in the top end of the satisfactory range. The ACCC rates airports as very poor, poor, satisfactory, good or excellent.

The report noted Perth Airport’s significant improvement in the quality of service ratings from passengers and airlines over the past three years had coincided with a substantial investment program.

It said the satisfactory ratings at Sydney or Melbourne had remained relatively unchanged over the past few years, sitting slightly below the threshold for good, while Brisbane had maintained its good overall rating.

Overall passenger numbers at the four airports grew by 2.7 percent to 115.2 million in 2016-17, with a 6.7 percent rise in international growth the driving force.

The competition commission was pleased the airports appeared to be handling the issue of congestion with on-time performance apparently improving.

Watch a low visibility Cat IIIA landing from the cockpit.

“The four airports are handling 30 million passengers a year more today than they did a decade ago,” Sims said. “But we are pleased the monitored airports appear to be dealing with the challenge of congestion, and three of the four airports are in the process of either constructing or planning a new runway.”

The $A1.3 billion runway at Brisbane Airport is the first new runway to be built and is expected to be operational in 2020 but Melbourne and Perth are also planning projects and a new airport is being developed in Western Sydney.

The ACCC also pointed to investments such as the Terminal 4 Precinct in Melbourne and Perth Airport’s Terminal 1 Domestic Pier.

“With demand for air traffic projected to grow further over the next 10 to 15 years, continued investment in airport infrastructure is needed to expand capacity to meet increasing demand,’’ the competition watchdog said.

Also important was a regular federal government review of the curfew and movement restrictions at Sydney Airport to ensure the benefits did not outweigh the costs.

This included looking at external factors such as technological improvements in aircraft as well as demand growth and infrastructure investment, the commission said.

The ACCC also argued it was vital that the new $A5.3 billion Western Sydney Airport was not hampered by similar restrictions to those imposed in Sydney Airport.

“It is important that the benefits of this planning are fully realized by an airport that can operate at all hours of the day, and that this operational freedom is not jeopardized in future by insufficient protection from urban development,’’ it said.

“The airport itself should also be designed to minimize environmental and noise impacts.”

Disclosure: Steve Creedy also contributes to The Airport Professional published by the Australian Airports Association.

The CEO of Air France’s offspring Joon takes care not to mention the M-word.

“Joon is for everyone, Joon is the next generation travel experience, it is to build an innovative product in what could be the travel of tomorrow,” Jean-Michel Mathieu tells airlineratings.com in Cape Town after Joon’s first long-haul flight from Paris

Joon, which positions itself not as a low-cost carrier (LCC) but a hybrid airline model, has been ridiculed, and probably deservedly, for originally positioning itself as the “millennial airline”.

This was dismissed by many in the industry as a marketing exercise of a carrier in distress which, as on-going strikes vividly illustrate, clearly is the case for Air France.

Air France is far behind the competition,  both in Europe and worldwide, when it comes to cutting its high costs and becoming more efficient to face today’s tough marketplace. The most recent offers of pay rises to staff point to anything but actual cost-cutting.

In the current context, Joon might even become more important in acting as a kind of innovation lab for the behemoth mother airline.

“We test some new processes on aircraft turnarounds to increase utilization. For example, catering within Europe is only loaded every four flights on short haul, that drives significant cost reductions,” says Mathieu.

Innovations like these are the reason that Joon’s operating costs are 15-18 percent those at Air France (not counting fuel), according to its CEO.

WATCH Spencer the Robot.

This is slightly surprising as Joon has to make use of Air France pilots, so gets no cost saving there.

Only newly hired cabin crew, wearing their signature blue shirts made partially of recycled plastic bottles and white sneakers have different contracts with higher workloads and lower salaries than the mainline carrier.

There are currently 500 of them, growing to 1,100 by 2020, leading Mathieu to observe:  “We are on track to deliver the desired cost reductions.”

Between its launch in December 2017, to the end of March, Joon carried half a million passengers on its initial eight short-haul European routes. It currently operates eleven narrow-bodies (four A321s and seven A320s) and soon will be flying four refurbished A340-300s, all taken from Air France.

Medium-haul operations to Cairo began in late March with long-haul services starting to Cape Town in April, taking over from Air France.

May will see the launch of new services for the group both to Mahé/Seychelles and the Brazilian city of Fortaleza, while in June Mumbai will be taken over from Air France.

Joon is very much operating within a fixed framework, as labor relations within Air France are so delicate management had to agree to a maximum size for its new offspring.

This means the airline can’t act as flexibly as a new airline normally would. There will be no further destinations for the time being, with just Budapest and Bergen (and one aircraft) added from late October.

The maximum fleet size is set in stone too.

It can grow to 28 aircraft, which will be reached in 2020. It will then comprise of 18 Airbus A320/321s (already flying in the European summer period in 2019) and ten long-haul aircraft, initially consisting of only four A340-300 this year, being complemented by new A350-900s delivered fresh from Toulouse from September, 2019.

READ: Millenial magnet Joon goes long-haul.

Air France has a total order of 21 A350s, of which the first ten will go to Joon until 2021.

With these, Joon will be France’s second largest long-haul carrier, after Air France.

It flies under its own AOC, but uses the AF code, and operates very much in tandem with the mother, as 50 percent of Joon passengers connect to or from Air France in Paris.

Only when the A350s join the fleet next year, a fundamental flaw will be rectified.

Though positioned as a somehow young and innovative airline, the core feature is currently missing: onboard Wi-fi.

This has long been offered by competitors such as Norwegian but Air France/KLM in general –again- is far behind the competition. This seems particularly inexcusable for a product branded like Joon.

“It was not possible to retrofit on the A340s within a reasonable time, it would have taken two years – and in three years from now we will have an almost full A350 fleet,” explains Mathieu.

Joon’s most successful routes so far in Europe have been services from Paris both to Berlin and Rome, which it took over from Air France and increased frequencies to seven daily for both.

“The Berlin route is very positive with load factors over 90 percent, more than Air France had before,” enthuses Mathieu.

On the routes it serves, Joon saw double-digit increases in capacity (and experiences over 80 percent average loads) as it’s using bigger aircraft (A320/321s) than Air France (A318/319s).

Its somewhat random long-haul network is explained by the CEO: “We target a good mix of business and leisure traffic to cities where there is a high potential, but fierce competition, where we were in a defensive mood and now want to fight back.”

Examples are Tehran, Cairo or Mumbai.

“In India, the Gulf carriers are very strong, and one ambition of Joon is to be better able to fight back against Gulf carriers,”  Mathieu adds.

Targeting Millennials or not, many in the industry are skeptical about Joon’s future.

“It’s too little, too late, much more fundamental changes at Air France are needed,” says Frenchman Sylvain Bosc, who worked in the airline’s management for 13 years and now is CCO of African LCC Fastjet.

At least Joon takes a fresh approach not tried yet by industry peers such as LEVEL, IAG’s long-haul LCC, or Lufthansa’s low-cost arm Eurowings.

The last Qantas Boeing 747 service to Los Angeles will operate on December 3 as the aircraft is replaced by a combination of Airbus A380 and Boeing 787-9 aircraft.

The change is one a raft of adjustments Qantas is making to its international network as it fine-tunes it to meet changes in demand and the competitive landscape.

They include changes on routes to the US, the Philippines, Japan and China that include frequency reductions on Sydney-Dallas/Fort Worth and Sydney-Beijing.

“The adjustments to our international network are part of our strategy of making the best use of our fleet and matching demand by having the right aircraft, on the right route, at the right time,’’ a Qantas spokeswoman said.

READ: Qantas to look at Paris after conquering Perth-London non-stop.

The iconic 747, which is progressively being phased out of passenger service worldwide as it replaced by more efficient twin-engine planes, will be replaced by an A380 from December 4 by an A380 on the Tuesday QF11/QF12 Sydney-LA flight.

This will provide daily A380 services to Los Angeles from both Sydney and Melbourne.

The seasonal twice-weekly QF17/18 Sydney Los Angeles services will also be operated by an A380 during the December-January peak.

Qantas had already announced its daily Brisbane-Los Angeles-New York City Boeing 747 services would be replaced by a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner and that the new, fuel-efficient planes would operate Melbourne-San Francisco four times a week.

WATCH: Qantas air-to-air video of Boeing 787 “Quokka”

The Sydney change allows an additional Boeing 747 service to be deployed on Sydney-San Francisco from December 17 to give customers a daily flight.

At the same time, the QF7/8 Sydney-Dallas-Fort Worth service will be reduced to six A380 flights a week. The airline has warned it may have to cut this route if its application to form a joint venture with American airlines is again rejected by the US Department of Transportation.

READ: American, Qantas promise lower fares in new bid for a joint venture.

The airline is adding capacity on the QF3/QF4 Sydney-Honolulu service during the December 7 to Easter holiday peak as the normal Airbus A330-300 service is upgraded to a Boeing 747-400.

This adds 300 seats and gives customers the choice of premium economy on the popular holiday route.

Qantas is also adjusting capacity to Asia to better meet demand.

It will offer an additional QF33/34 A330 service between Sydney and Osaka from December 7, boosting the service which began in December last year to four times a week.

The QF19/20 Sydney-manilla service will be boosted to daily from six times a week from October 28.

However, the QF 107/108 Sydney-Beijing service will reduce from daily to five times a week on the same date because of lower demand on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The airline said customers booked on flights affected by the changes would be accommodated on other services.

“We’re already seeing strong demand for the end of year holiday period on our services to Los Angeles and Osaka, so we expect the extra capacity to be well received,” the spokeswoman said.

With the changes, Qantas will still fly 747s to Honolulu, Tokyo-Haneda, Hong Kong, Santiago, Johannesburg and San Francisco.

The airline said at its 2017 annual results it plans to retire four older 747s by the end of 2019, leaving it with the six youngest aircraft.  These aircraft will also be retired in the 2020s after it decides between long-range Boeing 777 or Airbus A350 widebody aircraft as part of “Project Sunrise”.