Washington bristles with grand luxury hotels like the Willard Intercontinental.
Hotels like this have the space and the facilities to create the luxury experience.
Airlines try as best as they can with limited and varying degrees of success to do the same thing.
Now Etihad, the national airline of Abu Dhabi, has gone a quantum leap further.
With its new layout for the A380 superjumbo, it's created the residence in the sky.
It's exclusive; it's luxurious and, oh, so expensive.
The Etihad, they call this their apartments, their first-class environment.
Your bed is made for you. Your slippers are provided. Your pajamas are sitting on the bed. There's a little chocolate for you.
But come and have a look at this.
The Residence by Etihad, as this airline calls it,
your sitting room, your en suite bathroom, and then a wonderful, wonderful bedroom at the back.
Oh, I have to try out this hand-made mattress -- shoes off!
Oh! It's fabulous.
This level of luxury is a first for a commercial carrier.
The goal -- to take a quantum leap over key rivals.
Well, the offer also includes a bespoke butler.
Mine's off doing something else at the moment, so I thought I'd drag in the CEO and president of the airline, James Hogan.
Hey, Becky.
Hello, sir.
How are you?
Come on in. I have to give you a date.
Fantastic.
Do join me here in my boudoir.
The A380 and the introduction of the 707 has given us the opportunity to raise the bar.
And we sat back -- our planning team, our design team -- we looked at the behavior; we looked at the various segmentation.
We saw there was a need for those long-haul sectors -- 10 hours, 15 hours --
where you could actually introduce The Residence, you could bring style into a commercial aircraft.
And that's what we've done.
Just walk me through the design process.
[We've got] a different design to our competitors.
It's the same number of seats in the upper deck, but we've truly introduced true innovation.
We, in fact, started focus groups in Abu Dhabi, in London, in New York and Sydney over two days with our regular customers.
Day one was: Tell us what you don't like about flying.
And day two was: Let's build a cabin. Let's... what should air travel be in the future?
You're gonna be accused of this just being a bit of marketing.
There's a high-end market. There's a high-net-worth market.
Will they buy it? You bet they'll purchase it.
We're gonna introduce the aircraft in London.
If you want to purchase The Residence, that's 21,000 U.S. dollars,
and that's a fraction of the cost if you were taking a private jet.
What sort of occupancy do you need for this to wash its feet?
Fifty percent.
So, we believe all year around, if we achieve 50-percent utilization of The Residence, we'll wash our face, and your feet.