I have a friend who works for Apple and they get dirt cheap business class tickets to China. He says usually around $3000. For a human who has to pay human prices (eg, not a corporate deal), the multiple from coach is much greater.
For the purposes of this comment I just Google searched "SFO to Shanghai". The default is Jan 21-Feb 3 (so you're not paying a last-minute-booking penalty).
The prices are insanely cheap somehow, but the multiple holds up.
$527 economy
$1999 premium economy
$2853 business
$5340 first
I would fly premium economy every time if it existed on most airlines and the multiple was 'only' 50%. What normal human can afford 4x the price for a couple more inches of elbow and legroom? It's far greater than the cost of the actual space.
I tend to assume business will be three times the cost of economy; I suspect SFO to Shanghai is a weird route from a price perspective, much like London to NYC; very few landing spots available. I'd also consider Jan 21-Feb 3 to be pretty last minute.
AMS-IAD (two airports with good capacity) for the default Google Flight dates show 45k for economy, 99k for PE, and 120k (all INR) for business, all on reasonable airlines
For the purposes of this comment I just Google searched "SFO to Shanghai". The default is Jan 21-Feb 3 (so you're not paying a last-minute-booking penalty).
The prices are insanely cheap somehow, but the multiple holds up.
$527 economy $1999 premium economy $2853 business $5340 first
I would fly premium economy every time if it existed on most airlines and the multiple was 'only' 50%. What normal human can afford 4x the price for a couple more inches of elbow and legroom? It's far greater than the cost of the actual space.