We’re The Up Front. We create the world’s best in-depth, independent journalism on the topics that matter for the people who live and breathe the passenger experience in aviation: airlines, passengers, designers, manufacturers, industry insiders, and the supply chain and ecosystem that surround it all. Our audience is B2B+C, and our stories are vital for aviation experts to understand our industry — and of interest to expert travellers as well.
We’re fascinated by the aviation industry and passionate about telling its complicated and intricate stories — writing traditional classic journalism in-depth, with a modern forward-looking flair, and publishing it using a sustainable model that’s all our own.
We bring you in-depth analysis that focuses on the bigger picture, explain what’s happening and why, and we take our time to do it well. We strive for balance but always speak our minds, without the false equivalence of bothsidesism. We don’t just report things as they happen, throw up SEO clickbait, or rip-and-repost press releases (or worse, other journalists’ stories).
We write about what really matters in the industry, breaking news where it’s important to do so, but also never rushing to be first just for the sake of being first. Instead, we take our time to consider not just what the latest update is in our ever-changing industry, but what it means, and why it’s happening.
We’re up front about concentrating on the forward part of the aircraft cabin: while we travel regularly in all classes on the airplane and off it, airlines make most of their profit and invest most of their resources into business class, first class and premium economy, as well as the other elements of the passenger experience that go into premium travel. We think it’s here that we can tell the most informative and thought-provoking stories, but we’ll always bring you the contexts throughout the spectrum of passenger experience.
We encourage you to consider contexts of travel, and we think it’s important to connect the dots
In-depth, longform journalism is so important to us because it encourages thinking more widely than just a single seat or one flight — because that’s what every person on board does. Everyone’s travelling for a reason, often more than one reason. They’ll be engaging with many other forms of transport and accommodation on their trip that inform how they think about their experience.
A crummy lounge, disorganised outsourced airport ground handling, a dismal baggage hall, or lost luggage? That affects how we think about the flight too. We think of these as the contexts of travel, and we think that understanding them is vital to understanding what and how passengers think subjectively and objectively about their travel.
Here’s what we mean: picture yourself on a flight. You can focus in detail into your space in the seat, the materials that make it up, the entertainment, and the service. You can focus more widely out of your space, on the crew, the cabin, the airplane, and the airline experience. You can focus ahead in time, to what you’re expecting at the airport where you’re arriving, where you’re going, how you’ll get there, and what your plans are afterwards. You can focus back in time, to the experience at the airport, how you got there, even to how you booked a flight or your experience of the airline’s loyalty program and your connection with its wider brand.
All these contexts set your expectations against which you, the passenger, measure your experience. The contexts of travel affect how you perceive what’s going on around you. They change the way you feel on the flight, and shape your impressions — before, during and after the flight. And they shape how airlines need to design the passenger experience as a result.
How you can support The Up Front and our new model for journalism
The Up Front is funded by readers like you, at Subscriber and Pro level. During our launch phase, we plan to bring you around 3000–5000 words a week, usually split up into two stories. We plan for roughly half of our work to be available publicly, and half to be exclusively available for our supporters at Subscriber and Pro levels.
Our Subscriber level unlocks every article on the site, plus audio versions read by our journalists — never AI — as well as our subscriber-only weekly roundup newsletter, The Up Front Update. You’ll also get access to our monthly industry insider strategy podcast, 40,000 Feet. You can also choose between weekly digest emails or a brief notification email every time we publish, or both if you prefer.
Our Pro subscription level unlocks everything at Subscriber level, plus critical intelligence for people working in the industry — or who fly so much that it feels like they do. You’ll gain access to industry-level readouts from expos, airshows and key product releases, as well as an extended and video version of our podcast, 40,000 Feet, transcribed if you prefer. We’ll invite you to our quarterly online roundtables, featuring our editorial staff and expert guests, on the most important topics as we see them. At the end of every year, we’ll offer an annual e-book compendium of all our articles from the year — perfect for a long flight. You’ll also get regular feedback opportunities with our editor in chief and publisher, so you can steer our coverage towards what matters to you. And you can also purchase consulting hours from our team if there’s something vital you want to know.
We’ve created our own systems for our subscriber model, like Patreon or Substack, but without an outrageous processing overhead or contributing to a platform that funds Nazis. We’re launching without corporate seed funding or deep-pocketed investors, so for our first year we’re excited to offer a limited launch promotion as our version of seed funding: five years of Pro for the price of five years of Subscriber — that’s 50% off, to thank you for believing in our mission. We’re here for the long haul, and we’d love you to be too.
We also offer a single weekly advertising slot to help us fund our journalism, in a unique way in aviation media. One advertiser every week, one message, in one place on each article and in our newsletter: nothing flashy, nothing annoying, just an opportunity for companies who understand that the most influential people in our business read The Up Front, and who want to both get a message across and to support independent journalism. To get in touch with our advertising team — who are completely separate from our editorial staff — please email advertise@theupfrontgroup.com.