Ever since Carsten Spohr became chief executive officer of Deutsche Lufthansa nine years ago, he’s been told the German airline’s first class was too big and it should cut back: Companies were no longer willing to splurge on this employee perk when a flat bed in business class would suffice. Some carriers scrapped their highest-tier service entirely.

Now, leisure passengers keen to live their best lives following the pandemic (and untroubled by their carbon footprints) are filling up first-class cabins; they think nothing of dropping $10,000 on a one-way fare that comes with extras such as limousine service and a personal assistant at the airport. Lufthansa executives have also changed their tune: “This year is the first year all my team tell me, Spohr, we need to grow first class, it’s under-dimensioned. I never thought that I will ever hear that,” he told investors last week.

A shortage of first-class seats is the definition of a first-world problem. Airlines are betting this isn’t a temporary “revenge-spending” phenomenon but rather a structural shift in how the rich spend their cash. There’s a lot riding on that call being right.

The renaissance of the first-class cabin is part of a broader boom in high-end leisure travel, which is boosting yields (average fares) and helping travel companies repair their balance sheets following a devastating pandemic. Lufthansa is forecasting its best-ever summer in terms of flight revenue and says premium seats are “sold out.” Last week, British Airways owner International Consolidated Airlines raised full-year profit guidance, after saying in February the premium leisure segment was performing “very well.”

Premium leisure demand at Air France has “exploded” and the company’s La Premiere first-class cabins have in the past three or four months enjoyed their highest-ever occupancy rates, management said last week. Overall, premium seat occupancy at the Air France-KLM group was four percentage points higher in the first quarter compared with the same period in 2019, while fares were 15% higher. “High-end leisure, especially into Paris, is very strong,” the Franco-Dutch group’s management added. For every business class ticket Dubai-based Emirates Airlines sold out of London, “there were four or five people trying to get it” at one point and hence prices have increased, its president Tim Clark told Bloomberg Television.

Airlines’ premium bookings have rebounded faster than total passenger traffic, especially in North America and Europe. Remarkably, this is happening even as business travel has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels; perhaps it won’t now that Zoom will suffice for less important corporate meetings, but the airlines won’t mind as much if the premium leisure boom continues.

The skies are crowded with private jets, business-class plane cabins and lounges are overflowing with tourists, and less affluent passengers are treating themselves to a more comfortable seat in premium economy (which is particularly lucrative for airlines).

And it’s not just aviation that’s profiting from the boom: Norwegian Cruise Line revealed last week that reservations for its latest 154-night Regent luxury world voyage were almost 70% ahead of pre-pandemic levels at an average price of over $230,000 (!) per suite.

Airlines are trying to capitalize on high-end demand by unveiling new premium cabin designs, rejigging the ratio of economy to premium seating and reactivating mothballed large aircraft like the A380 and A340 which offer lots of premium space. Before the pandemic, Air France used to reduce the number of business-class seats ahead of the summer tourist season, but won’t this year to ensure it can meet high demand.

A five percentage-point increase in the premium cabin seating mix at Qantas Airways, compared with pre-pandemic levels, helped boost international operating margins to a record 12% in the six months to December 2022; it said leisure accounted for 60% of premium cabin bookings on long-haul routes.

Gone are the days when premium cabin leisure travelers are just using up points or have scored a free upgrade. Now they are paying the full amount themselves and more of them are booking directly via airline websites rather than through travel agents, providing the airline with profitable opportunities to upsell.

One obvious conclusion is that the rich simply aren’t feeling the cost-of-living crisis the way rest of us are, and travel has moved up their list of priorities. “We don’t only see it aviation,” Lufthansa’s Spohr said week. “You see it in high-end cars, you see it in high-end watches, you see it in high-end luxury products. Look at LVMH in France, look at the German car manufacturers. There is a general trend towards luxury, towards premium for those people who can afford it. Travel is surely part of that.”

The wealthy also now have more time on their hands. Flexible working makes it possible to toil from a second home in Florida on a Friday before hitting Miami’s beaches or sailing the yacht on the weekend.

A common refrain in aviation is once you’ve sampled the delights of the premium cabin, it’s hard to contemplate returning to the indignities of cattle class. But are wonderful travel memories really so priceless? A banking crisis, deep recession and/or stock market meltdown would surely make leisure passengers more price conscious. Private jet demand has already begun to fade, albeit from very high levels, while U.S. demand for luxury goods is slowing.

Furthermore, Wall Street CEOs are busy culling work-from-home privileges, potentially making opportunistic leisure trips harder to arrange. For now, though, airlines aren’t so much worried about whether wealthy customers will continue to splurge on first class, as they are about whether there’s enough room left at the front of the plane to accommodate them.

Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for the Financial Times.

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