Delta’s outsourced Sky magazine laid off all its staff at the start of the pandemic. American, which outsourced American Way starting with US Airways management’s takeover in 2015, followed suit a year later despite The Onion once suggesting that the airline stop flying passengers to focus on its core magazine business.
And now United Airlines has followed suit axing its Hemispheres magazine from seatback pockets.
Hemispheres, United Airlines’ on-flight magazine, is ceasing its print product, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Already, the magazine’s website appears to be winding down. Its domain, hemispheresmag.com, now redirects to United’s website. As early as last month, the site was up and contained the archives of past issues, according to the Wayback Machine. Now, the archive seems to be offline and instead includes links to sample articles from the most recent issue. Indeed, much of the August issue was never published online, according to sources.
Hemispheres lasted 32 years. Passengers skew higher income, and used to be bored on board. They were perfect advertising targets and an inflight magazine was an effective vehicle to monetize their attention.
The median household income for Hemispheres (so, presumably, for a United passenger) was $154,800. And according to their media kit, prices for ads ranged from $16,360 (1/6th page) to $115,608 (full-page advertising takeover).
United’s magazine was especially good, known for the “Three Perfect Days” itinerary features often for destinations serve by United. Many of those had ideas that were quite good. Since 2009 the magazine was published by Ink.
According to the airline,
A digital experience allows us to make Hemispheres even better — we can reach a wider audience, offer more personalized content and tell richer stories. We’ve even hired additional United staff to help us bring this new vision to life. We’re excited about the future possibilities and look forward to sharing more details soon.
As SkyMall learned, inflight internet and personal entertainment devices mean there’s no longer a captive audience for selling inflight. And magazine costs aren’t just printing, but also weight which means fuel.
United’s strategy is a new media network of targeted digital ads, making print something of a relic, but the airline’s inflight wifi doesn’t yet consistently work well enough to distract and their ex-Comcast exec’s ad platform isn’t yet mature.
I do miss the Delta in-flight magazine. But what I really miss is newspapers and magazines in the Sky Club. Since the pandemic the newspapers have been eliminated. And the magazines are the awful real estate magazines or the business traveler-type magazines that is just copied and pasted press releases or questionable reviews written by names that sound fake.
The “Three Perfect Days” were just about the only pages which I would read in the United magazines. I will miss them.
If any of you read those magazines and found those pages for the “Three Perfect Days” destination missing, it could have been I who ripped the pages out to take with me. 😀
Honestly, I miss all inflight magazines. I just flew cross-country and the WiFi was INOP.
Not surprisingly, there were no seat back inflight entertainment systems either.
Just boring.
The airline industry is changing and not in a good way.
My mega-frequent flying began as a NY-DC shuttle runner. I would run by the airline newsstands and fill my hands with whichever newspapers and magazines caught my interest. At some point I graduated up to grabbing the papers and magazines from lounges, but nowadays the print selections are barely there and getting printed newspapers and magazines on the planes has become ever more rare.
Now time to go back to read my digital copies of The Economist and WSJ ….. because by the time I get the print editions “the news won’t be new, it will be old”.
From time to time when I was on flights,I only mainly flips through the magazines and then returned them to the back pocket on the chair cause most of the stuff in the magazines were nothing more than boring articles or garbage ads
“And magazine costs aren’t just printing, but also weight which means fuel. ”
If United is that concerned about weight, they should focus on their passengers.
@FNT Delta Diamond … I also miss the newspapers . I remember the table with newspapers in FC , and the latest magazines with cartoons , such as The New Yorker .
Dang, those print magazines provided some lumbar support in the new slimline Y seats.
The only thing that I will miss from the inflight magazine is the list of aircraft types that an airline flies.
Too bad, but it is part of a trend to replace paper with screens everywhere. Airline magazines could have been an excellent way for management to communicate with their customers, and perhaps they were at one time, but advertising and fluff pieces took over. But then for most passengers customer service has been going down for a long time. I only know of one time when an article actually discussed what to do in an emergency and my suggestion to an editor to have a series on how commercial aviation actually works and how planes fly was quickly dismissed. But I still think that it is what customers would have found interesting and memorable when they thought about the line. It would have been a way to reach them as people who flew, not as seats to fill.
I fly very regularly and very rarely look at the magazine. The cost of printing the magazine and the cost of fuel to carry the extra weight cannot be beneficial to the company. Nowadays we have access to news and entertainment through our own devices. Bye Bye.
The wife and I used to joke how on every flight back in the day, the flight attendants would mention “our award winning in flight magazine”. Every time, every airline- “award winning”,
We always wondered what awards they were winning, and how all of them seemed to be getting these awards.
Alas, the internet keeps eliminating jobs.
More Scott Kirby “service amenity” cuts. Wonder what is next? The seat pockets themselves? United has already QR’d code it’s customer service, will they at least give us a QR sticker on the back of every seatback?
Hemisphere provided me with an hour or two of entertainment in doing the sudukos and the crossword puzzle. Now I will have to remember to bring my own sudukos on my United flights as I currently do with my American flights. IMO the airlines are missing a relatively inexpensive way to attract and keep customers by providing a small (10 – 12 pages) publication full of entertainment such as mind games, fun facts, and airline information (such as planes, terminals, route maps and updates on future developments) The airlines do have at least a semi-captive audience and providing the right kind of print media can be a positive way to increase brand loyalty.
I enjoyed reading United’s Hemorrhoids magazine for many years on their flights.
It gave the brand some shine and prestige
Oh well the world keeps changing for the worse I suppose get used to it!
I miss newspapers in hotels and great in house dining.
Glad to have been there in the best of times.
I’m old 🙁
The loss of Hemispheres is a huge one. It always maintained a higher quality, even after Ink took over and it dropped slightly. TPD was something I looked forward to each edition.
Although not unexpected, the dropping of “Hemispheres” is really sad. Forget about the cheesy ads for matchmakers and celebrity physicians, but the editorial material and accompanying photography were actually excellent.
The magazine did provide an excellent distraction not only in-flight but also in the United Clubs.
It will be interesting to see how they manage to inform passengers of beverage and food (snack) options, as well as entertainment options now. Will they stuff a pamphlet describing these options at every seat? Since not all United aircraft have screens at every seat (or working screens at every seat) and clearly you can’t assume that everyone has a tablet or notebook PC with internet access to get such material, what is their plan?
The only downside of the magazines or any other materials in the seatback pockets (or elsewhere for bulkhead seats, for example) is the problem of regularly cleaning those pockets and assuring that the materials are not torn, ragged, or (very often) missing.
That’s a real shame. On a recent flight back from Vegas I was sitting next to a guy flying back to New Zealand, and he lived in the precise location the ‘three days’article was covering.
It was a great conversation, and he validated a lot of the quality of that article
It’s unfortunate they cannot figure out a way to keep at least that article going.
Maybe they should just set it up as a video or podcast series on the media servers…
I’m a retired United Airline employee out of LAX. I’m very disappointed in the decision to remove the Hemisphere magazine from the aircraft’s seat pockets. I have flown to so many countries and always reached for the magazine and thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it from cover to cover. I’m sad.
I love Hemispheres and look forward to it on every flight. I like the route map, games, checking to see if they have any new food options, etc. Three perfect days was great and I really loved the CEO/Employee op-eds in the front. I always felt like United was a little better than the other guys because they hadn’t removed this yet…I think this is very shortsighted and had an employee last week on a flight tell me that the annual projected savings is less than $500k…