I suspect there is a lot of pent up demand in mid-range travel
I was going to start a thread about this, but probably better here.
I think when we're talking about 'mid range' we need to spell out what that means as its all a bit fuzzy. I started another thread after the speculation of VA going 'mid' between QF and JQ and how I couldn't see where the interest was going to come from.
Mid range to me, over the last decade or two, has almost invariably turned out to mean paying more for slightly less coughty Y class travel. Ultimately though, I've either got the money or I don't. If I don't, then its a better proposition to just travel LCC and wear the annoying traits it presents. If you do have a little bit of means then going proper J (or F!) is much more likely to provide an experience more aligned to expectation.
For a while and with different airlines I experimented with Y+, but unless you travel roughly the same week as new Y+ is offered by an airline and its all shiny and getting the attention, it mostly just turns out to be a pretty normal Y experience with perhaps a couple of extra inches of legroom (though no guarantee). Its all a bit of a con quite frankly.
When VA first came out with their J domestic product, they priced it to get attention. Things varied a bit over the first year or so, but I remember taking many many transcon J flights for anywhere between high $600's to around $800-900 one-way (PER-MEL for example).
J cabins were mostly full. I was happy to pay actual cash for these flights and did so.
Time passed, the old A330's made way for new ones (were the old ones wet leased from emirates?). Fare price climbed and climbed, reaching about 1400-1600 transcon one-way before the collapse. Once the fare crossed the psychological barrier of about $1000 one way transcon I stopped paying cash and started using points for J seats. Perhaps this was VA's plan all along? I heard a lot of talk early on about the 'halo' effect of running J cabins ... I took this to mean that an airline presents a shiny J product and people aspire to fly in it which drives the FF program .... the FF program being the entity that _actually_ makes money in the whole affair.
In any event, for a long time the J cabins where essentially deserted. To be fair, I did notice in the last couple of years that the J cabins were almost always full, despite the high cash price of fares ... my suspicion is that VA opened up a lot more stock for FF redemption. Either way, full premium cabins has to be a good thing ... right?
I don't understand the machine behind yield optimization and the business plan, at its fundamentals, that drove VA J, but it always seemed to me to be a mistake to raise the J price to a level where few people would choose to pay new cash to get a seat. FF points are cash already earned, and one way or another you'll get punters to spend those, whether its toasters or seat redemptions of some type.
By the by, I, for one, was more than satisfied with the 70% angled seating that that old VA 330's used to provide. The lie-flat cubicle style we ended up with in 'the business' was truly fantastic, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every flight in that seating, but its a bit over the top for domestic and more akin to an 'F' style travel than J imho. I know QF provides much the same, but QF, right now, one-way transcon, $1600 (!!!). Seriously, give me a decent angled lie-back seat for $900-1100 and I'll take that any day of the week.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of pondering what 'mid range' really means when the new potential owners of VA are talking about it. The obvious, above JQ but below QF is fine, but what does that actually mean? On the ground, in the air? I'd have thought that VA1 was for the most a mid range carrier already. Without the global alliance or reach of QF, nor the deep pockets or routes, VA1 was always 'less' than QF, yet provided significantly more passenger value than JQ could.