I've had four overnight delays on three transatlantic trips this year. Fortunately, EU passenger compensation rules applied to three of them; the airline must pay each delayed passenger 600€ or convince them to take a more compelling non-cash offer.
I'm not for heavily regulating non-safety details of how most industries do business, but I do think it's fair to demand the true price up front and compensation when the airline doesn't provide the service it sold for reasons within its control.
Right, I've had train companies put me in a taxi, and just eat the price of a taxi to wherever because if you want to sell tickets to travel to X, and then oops you can't get me to X well, I didn't buy your "regret" that you can't do that - I bought travel to X, so if that's still possible you'd better make it happen and too bad if that's not profitable.
In Italy, for regional trains, since 2025 Trenitalia gives the reimboursement automatically to your credit card if you purchased the ticket electronically. [1]
There was a year I made more money from flying than I spent, because I kept flying ryanair or easyjet and I kept getting massive delays (one was a 20h delay, in which I spent the night at the airport squatting some of the couches in a cafe in the terminal, because small delays kept being slowly pushed on us, and we also spent 2h waiting in the final plane for it to take off, no A/C and they refused to give us water threatening to call the cops on us if we did get water bottles ourselves, great experience!)
Absolutely not in my experience, maybe I've just been really unlucky but I can't remember more than 1 Ryanair flight I've been on that was actually on time. Most delayed by less than 4 hours, but delayed.
Making flying even crappier doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Regulations that put a floor on how crappy airlines can be should be pretty neutral on competition since all the airlines would have the same rules.
That's not to say all rules are a good idea, even rules that raise quality -- raising the floor raises prices, and if the floor is raised higher than necessary, prices are higher than necessary too, making flying less affordable. Set the floor too low and people fly less because it's too crappy. Set the floor too high and people fly less because it's too expensive. You're looking for the balance point.
IMO, the floor is too low right now. I think it's a mistake to try to lower it.
> Set the floor too low and people fly less because it's too crappy.
Seems like a great opportunity for an airline to be less crappy and make a lot of money selling tickets to all those people who are "flying less" on other airlines, no?
So the question then becomes why hasn't someone done that already, if the floor really is "too low"?
No. Because people don't know how crappy it will be when they book.
They're just juggling prices and scheduled times.
People who aren't flying very frequently and don't have a trustworthy source of knowledgeable recommendations -- that is, a substantial majority of people -- will never take enough flights to know which airlines are worth $X more. If they even have many options for their route and time.
The last flight I was on was American Airlines. We waited in the plane while they tried to figure out to start it because the auxiliary power unit was out, and the generator American uses to start planes with no APU was also broken, so they had to borrow one from another airline. And no APU also meant no air conditioning until the plane is started.
It was only a 30 minute delay but the heat made it miserable.
I paid for a name brand airline, paid to choose a decent seat, could have paid for more upgrades, but no amount of money short could prevent me from waiting out a delay in a hot cabin because the airline failed to maintain their equipment. The folks in first class faced the same miserable heat.
It's a market for lemons. Paying more doesn't assure quality, it just means you spent more money to get screwed. So people aren't willing to pay.
That wouldn't explain why the reverse happened. Everyone introduced the crappier economy tier; even the airlines initially saying they wouldn't eventually caved and now there's a crappy economy tier default. Moreover, gradually these crappy tiers converged, including some (united iirc) getting slightly less crappy following user demand.
Most people want cheaper tickets and don't shop on quality. In the rare cases that they do airlines readily adjust. But the airlines trying to offer quality as the default would go out of business
Price aggregators like Google Flights continue to show the crappy tier by default, which means that airlines have to offer that tier to appear competitive. No idea why Google wants to build its product this way, but there are only a few companies in this business.
One of the fundamental truths of American aviation is a significant fraction of fliers will buy the cheapest ticket every time. They’ll bitch about it. But if you cut some leg room and a few dollars off your tag, you’ll swing them from another.
Basic economy doesn’t exist because of Google Flights. It exists because it sells. Well enough that it sustained entire discount airline fleets until the majors copied their model.
Wouldn't it make sense for regulators to focus on those problems then, rather than on setting arbitrary industry-wide limits on what level of service consumers are allowed to buy?
Many airlines offer different fare classes. For a return ticket half way around the world, I can pay $1100 for Economy, $2800 for Premium Economy, $3900 for Business Class and $6900 for First Class.
It seems you have to charge a big, big premium to deliver a less crappy experience.
And even then, the experience is only better in some dimensions - your checked luggage receives the same handling no matter what ticket you buy.
Don't forget private charted jets. Those fill the >$7k hole for anyone willing to spend through the nose and they give the best experience of any flight.
> Making flying even crappier doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
It does, from a purely ecological point of view. What was the number again? 4 longhaul flights for life per person if we want to achieve sustainability?
The airline industry is a good example of an "open" market that is really anything but. It is effectively an state-supported oligopoly. Airlines have split up every major market, usually with very little competition amongst themselves, and then have a government bailout backstop if things go wrong (this include things like favorable bankruptcy laws that let them get out of wage commitments). This is without even getting into the unholy public-private airport situation.
The answer is actual competition with some reasonable passenger protections.
Let foreign carriers compete here (9th freedom rights). No bailouts for failed operations or even unusual circumstances like covid.
> The answer is actual competition with some reasonable passenger protections.
This is physically impossible. Airplanes require airports and airports only have so much space they can dedicate to flights.
An extreme example of this is the Ronald Reagan airport. How could you possibly get more competition there when it cannot grow and it's surrounded by the urban area?
That's like saying the solution to your water company monopoly is more competition. You can't bury more water lines for different companies. Someone has to own the existing lines.
Fiber optics is getting multiple providers in several markets, if not many. They do bury/lift multiple lines, even in more rural areas.
I think the biggest issue with airlines is they act as only an airline. The first company to realize they are a transportation company and can get you door to door will be great.
E.g. an airline that can seamlessly get you to/from the airport via a local premium/private transit line that can get you to your home or destination.
It's hard to see how that can happen when politicians take money from the rent-seekers who benefit from the status quo. "Competition is for losers", says Peter Thiel, so buy yourself a state-sanctioned monopoly (like Palantir).
The bailouts for unusual circumstances are a really interesting case. The "unusual circumstances" tend to be perfect for industry consolidation, which is normally (and rightly) viewed with at least some skepticism, but tends to get a pass during unusual circumstances as a matter of survival. In no small part this is driven by the desire not to cause thousands of people to be laid off with no equivalent pay opportunities in sight.
The PPP program turned out to be a widely abused transfer of wealth from taxpayers to capitalists, yes. But I actually think in general that bailouts, especially for smaller industry players, are an important tool for preventing industry consolidation, which causes generational-scale harm that is difficult to reverse or even remediate.
I think what need to happen is that it should be much easier to pierce the corporate veil in cases of obvious negligence in planning that leads to being unprepared for a predictable event. And of course putting an end to PE-style "corporate raiding" behavior that really just amounts to embezzlement. Imagine an economy in which the owners, directors, and chief executives of corporation are, as individuals, required to uphold some level of fiduciary duty to their customers. The economy might look very different in that case.
Book trips from European websites in the future. Prices here need to include everything upfront. Which might lead to situations where you reserve a hotel room in the USA for 1500, but then only pay 1200 at checkout because the remaining 300 are the "resort fee" that will be paid at the hotel. Or take car rental: the cheaper, more complete packages for the USA are often booked in the EU at at better price.
+1 for hotels, but I'd be careful with car rentals. Often, these bookings are tied to the country of residence of the driver, which could at least theoretically have insurance implications.
Can you give an example? I just checked a random rental website for France and I got a very clear `From $xx` price and I could — in one step — go to checkout with that exact price by simply not selecting any other options.
Sure you will have upsells but if a price for a service is presented, that should be a final price. You can't tack on "resort fees", the price presented must be inclusive of all the required charges. For example as much as I dislike Booking.com, the price they show for a room includes everything — tax, mandatory cleaning fee and city tax if applicable.
How does a lawmaker justify this being in the publics interest ? I'm not even joking, I know "well lobbyist going to lobby", but this is a legitimate question. How does a regulatory body say "Yup, that's okay with us to remove" ?
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: I could imagine airlines wanting to not allow for a full refund if passengers can be booked on a "reasonably similar" connection. (I've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)
The problem here of course would be the definition of "reasonably similar". Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.
Okay, I can see some benefits to the airline that are not too egregious for point 1, maybe automatic can be updated to manual intervention. Not the worst.
But price transparency ?
> A4A opposes the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) rules requiring airlines to disclose ancillary fees upfront, arguing that these rules exceed the DOT’s authority and don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers.
> don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers
As a customer I like to know where my money is going and how much.
I don't follow the point. Suppose we live in a perfect world where exactly similar alternative flights are always available the moment yours gets cancelled. You still have to pay for it. And you do that by using the refund money.
Cancelling a flight without refunding it, just means profiting at the expense of the customer.
Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).
Deregulating this point just puts all the risk and burden with millions of individual customers, some of whom cannot easily carry the cost of unexpected events, and aren't professional parties that can and routinely do enter into properly-negotiated insurance products to mitigate their risk.
> 've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)
My understanding is that refunds eligibility starts at a >3 hour change, meaning an alternative timetable of 2 hours doesn't trigger an automatic refund right now. Further, even in the case of a significant change (>3h), the refund isn't automatic, it is only paid once the customer refuses an alternative booking or compensation. For international flights it's even 6 hours instead of 3.
> Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.
I do agree on this point, context really matters. And I think in theory it makes sense to offer price-differentation based on the context. i.e. if I am slow-travelling for 4 months, I'd be happy taking a 10% cheaper ticket (no-insurance), and have no recourse if there is an 8 hour delay.
Whereas earlier this month when travelling overseas for a wedding the day prior, I'd have paid a 10% extra fee to insure my travel time, to ensure I have recourse to travel with a limited (<2h) delay no matter what or be significantly compensated.
But that's still all theory, at some point differentiation on everything leads to complex and difficult decision making for customers. Fun in a Sim computer game, not so fun when booking a flight is a 20-step process with 200 pages of T&C that I have to assess against my personal situation.
I'm mostly behind you with this, a great point that you make is the insurance.
> Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).
Those insurance companies have requirements for paying out, in Europe for example a low fare airline Ryanair will offer you a refund if your flight is delayed 2/3 hours. You can choose to still take the flight though which, for some is acceptable. But that refund is by way of a request, it's not automatically processed. It works, for me personally, but I've been delayed for important things where it was only an hour, I would have loved to have been able to get s refund to book on another airline but I have to say, I wouldn't "expect" that.. which is why I can soften on their first point.
Airlines caused automatic refunds by systematically screwing customers for a decade, doing every single thing in their power to avoid giving any refunds. This policy exists because they proved to everyone they can't be trusted.
It will be some variation of the well-treaded argument of "us making more money just so happens to be in the public interest". Companies have become experts at arguing this in many different ways. You can see some examples in the article. More competition, purely hypothetically lower prices, etc.
Dream: 'This will lower prices for consumers by reducing administrative overhead and allowing for people to select what protections and plans they want for their trip.'
Reality: Tickets all cost exactly the same (because no company is going to willingly take less money) except now you get to pay more for less benefits.
Easy. "The public voted up and down the ballot for the platform that promised to gut regulations and consumer protection." Who is a single representative to deny the will of the people?
I'd be curious to see how the all-in price of airline tickets has evolved in recent decades. It feels like it's now commonplace to have hundreds of dollars in additional fees for things like legroom. That means a cheap ticket is a midrange ticket and a midrange ticket can end up being quite expensive unless you fall for the "we get to strap you behind the bathroom with only the clothes on your back" Saver ticket.
It also means that you're often still out actual money if you use award miles.
Sure, but everyone agrees that first class is full of perks. “People taller than 6’1 can sit here without being in pain” shouldn’t be a multi-hundred dollar up charge.
I'm most familiar with United. Economy Plus (which is mostly about a bit more legroom) does have a modest premium absent sufficient status that gets you it for free. But Premium Economy that gives you somewhat wider seats as well as legroom gets into the hundreds of dollars. International business has lots of benefits including legroom and lie flat seating but that usually gets into the thousands.
EP is just economy with slightly more leg room. PE is closer to business than EP. The food is upgraded along with the service. The seats are more recliner like and you generally have more room. Additionally, the PE seats are often the quickest to deplane if that's important. I can also work in PE seat, whereas EP not so much.
The problem with PE is that it's often not that great of a deal. Unless it's a super busy route, you can usually keep shopping for an upgrade and just go all the way to lay flat business. Side note, when going business class, understand that not all plane layouts and seats are the same. Check seat guru.
Source - I fly back and forth to the EU quite a bit.
I agree with all that. The food still isn't great. And the seat still isn't great for a red-eye relative to business. I wouldn't generally work on a plane anyway. I've been in PE--don't remember the circumstances--but as I recall didn't think it was anything special for the cost.
Your final point is exactly it. PE is better, but the cost difference is generally too high above EP. At that point I tend to just go BC.
To your other points, at the end of the day, it's an airplane. And since I'm usually flying US airlines, even business class isn't that special outside of laying flat. I do fly back and forth to the EU enough though, that being able to work for 4ish hours is pretty useful.
Yeah. For me, $5K or whatever is still a decent amount and, even if you just put it in the vacation pile, that's a decent amount for meals and other experiences vs. being a bit more comfortable over a 10 hour (or whatever) flight.
My trick is that I always just buy the base economy ticket that can still be upgraded. Then I check for upgrades every couple days. What I found is that prices to move classes will vary wildly as they try to sell all the seats. It also makes it easier to upgrade a single leg - an overnight flight is more important to be lay flat than a daytime flight for example.
The other part of my equation is that I put a 'dollar figure x flight time' that I'm willing to pay to be more comfortable. If I see a price that hits my threshold I upgrade, otherwise not.
Eh, they already had economy plus. Premium economy is basically traditional domestic business class on widebody international flights that have lie-flat business (Polaris) seating as well. Honestly, putting it in the economy bucket in contrast to Polaris seems pretty honest in the scheme of things.
In a search just now, Delta Main r/t from ATL-LAX is $337. Delta Comfort on the same flight is $727. (Yes, it's more than 2x the price.) Obviously Comfort boards earlier, but it's not unreasonable to attribute most of the fare differential to the legroom.
I've never understood why boarding early is considered a premium worth paying for (for normal flights with assigned seating). Planes are never as comfortable as whatever I have access to in the airport, whether that's hanging out in the lounge or sipping a drink at a restaurant, or just stretching my legs walking around the airport.
When I used to have carry-ons, boarding early ensured that I got room in the overhead bins to place the bag. I now use under-seater bags only and pack light so I no longer care when I get to my seat.
Yep. I've taken several flights in the past few months, and _every time_ by the time my boarding group was called, the staff announced that there was no more overhead bin space, and people would have to check bags.
I'm 6'6" and I basically treat an exit row upgrade as non-negotiable. It's just a fundamental cost of long haul travel for me if I can't swing premium economy or business class.
To get some extra legroom, I paid (round trip, in CAD) $250 for a trip to Dublin this year and $320 for a trip to Hong Kong in 2023. That's a lot of money, but it was <50% of the cost to upgrade to premium economy and <20% of the cost to upgrade to business class.
This used to be much cheaper. I remember paying ~$100 for similar upgrades a decade ago, but airlines got wise to this at some point and jacked the prices way up.
This isn't totally dead. I missed a flight last year and got bumped to a flight the next morning on some weird ticket class where I didn't get a seat assignment until the gate. The gate agent was able to give me a bulkhead seat with extra legroom at no cost. And this was with United, not some airline with a shining reputation for customer service.
So you can roll the dice and try to get a premium seat at the gate, but that's not a risk I'm usually willing to take.
US flights (99% of what I have experienced) definitely can get into three figures for anything other than "middle seat, way back". They know there's at least a built-in audience of taller people who will spring for legroom on any flight over an hour. And now that I am old and tall, an aisle seat and legroom are incredibly valuable to me (don't tell 'em, ok?).
Oddly there is no such premium for wide people. I understand (somewhat) price discriminating based on the quantity of space required by the passenger (for comfort or from physical necessity), but then why does this apply to one dimension and not the other.
I'm not even talking about pay-by-weight as was famously tried between pacific islands. Nobody wants to have someone spilling over the armrest into their seat, and I'm sure plenty of people who are wider than the seat would like to fit without going first class. I'm not even so unusually sized, but cannot sit in the aisle without being hit by every person and trolley passing by.
There's rules for passengers and airlines... but enforcement is limited, because who wants to slow down boarding by checking.
And compliance is hard for passengers, because you have to call in to book the special case, and who wants to call in?
But theoretically, a passenger that will encroach on an adjacent seat can pay for the extra seat (I don't know if they need to also pay for seat assignment to get two seats next to each other), and then if the flight doesn't actually sell out, the extra seat fee is refundable. But when you actually board, people will see the 'empty' seat and try to sit in it, even though you paid for it. Etc.
Yes, as a 6' 2" person, I can assure you that a single leg of a flight will be less that $100 but round trip and multiple legs moves it to $200+ very easily.
Related to that; I am curious in what airlines think they will get or what motivates them to prioritize being deceptive, sneaky, dishonest, manipulative, lying, con-artists, i.e., just abusive all around? If everyone is required to provide "all in pricing" then there is no competitive advantage in being a bigger, better fraud; so must it be concluded that they think they have a competitive advantage at being the better scheming, fraudulent, manipulative con artist?
The airline market is so constricted and basically well across the line of a cartel, but I guess they think they get something out of it or do they just like the getting one over on people? "ha, you thought you were going to have a good time with your family or see your grandmother's funeral for X price, but we squeezed another $200 out of you, Sucker! *board room high fives all around*"
Or maybe is it a kind of momentum of the people and organizational structure that was built up over many years, aimed at facilitating the con and fraud perpetrated on the public that still has power to manipulate the airline enterprises themselves? The people who used to do that are after all, as I assume adept and oriented towards being deceptive, manipulative, scheming.
It's all a bit odd to me and I would love if someone could spill the beans on what motivates the airlines on being so adamant about cheating, lying, abusing, scamming, conning and generally being really awful to people and society.
It’s really easy: it’s all about revenue maximization.
Honestly, people fly too much. I’m 6’5 with a 24” shoulder - flying economy is painful for me and the poor soul stuck next to me.
I don’t need to fly for business and am fortunate to have a lot of PTO. So, I fly first class, business class, or not at all. If the cost is too much, i drive. There’s virtually no east coast trip that is more unpleasant to me via car. I’m young enough that I can do NY to Georgia or Chicago overnight with no ill effect. There’s so much wasted time around the airport many flights don’t even save time.
I’m going on a trip to Asia in the early spring with my kid. I could save like $4000 flying in the back… but why? If that amount of money is breaking the bank, I cannot afford two weeks there anyway.
First principle is that customers will choose whoever has the cheapest flights in general, and airlines that try to market on having an inclusive price without surprise fees suffer anyway because the real cost is closer to fees.
The second is price discrimination - think current McDonald's prices. Soaking people who can afford it and letting people who are very frugal navigate your confusing system and membership etc is worth a good amount of money
I'll just amend to say that many on this forum are probably not super price-sensitive. But, within the broader population, many people are going to be more or less unconditionally looking to shave $100 off their family vacation. Which encourages a lot of a la carte nickel and diming over all-in charges.
Not entirely true with the cheapest = first. I've been using a reputed and magnanimous airline for years and it doesn't matter what the other low-blow contenders are offering.
As long as it's in my anticipated budget, I want comfort, consistency, and courage. These undercutters have me scared they shaved off a wing to save on price. @#$% them. I fly with my airline, and these jerkoffs who want to bend over for fascism can die with it.
I absolutely love Delta. I’ll fly other airlines domestically occasionally. But I have found their customer service to be top notch and they have the best web interface/app.
(They are available from all the usual podcast places, but it just happens that the youtube mirror is the easiest way I know to link a specific episode.)
To add to this - is there some kind of general rule for what specific industries will devolve into the pattern of having these sorts of anti-consumer practices? Off the top of my mind I can think of cable companies, gyms, cellphone providers, airlines, live events. Is it market capture and/or the high cost of switching providers that prevents meaningful competition?
I think the main motivation is simply that reduced transparency enables better price discrimination: As a company, you want every individual to pay as much as they are willing/capable. You explicitly don't want to sell the same service for the same price to everyone.
Things like bonuses tend to be driven by short term gains. Who gives a hell about a few years from now when you can get an extra $xxxxxxx in your paycheck now.
> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.
Asking families if their teenager could be seated separately is one thing, but knowing the airlines, they might as well start seating the toddlers in the overhead luggage compartments.
Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board).
In theory yes because you can use the space at the top that would otherwise be above people's heads. No guarantee they get to their destination alive though.
Only a new airplane. Most planes are designed for a lot of air and couldn't fly with as many people as can physically fit inside. Cargo airplanes carefully watch this factor. As a passenger I've been on airplanes that took off with empty seats even though there were people on standby wanting to get on because with the weather they couldn't fly a full plane.
You and I should talk :) I've been thinking of this ever since seeing the movie "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone". He uses a sleeping gas on his audience packs them into a moving truck and "magically" transports his audience to a new location. Tada! Basically same idea, but substitute moving truck with jet.
That's still way too inefficient, it leaves so many gaps and barely tiles the space. As soon as we get our hands on full reconstruction, you can bet the airlines will require everyone to be ground into a slurry and pumped into the fuselage like a huge tank, and get reassembled at the destination.
People think I'm crazy for saying this but the only thing stopping big corporations from hiring hitmen to just actually murder people to be more profitable is that it's illegal to do so. If it were legal for them to make you put your baby in overhead luggage you bet your ass they'd be doing it if it were profitable.
This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.
I usually filter out all Basic Economy fares from my search and only look at the next tier up, where you can get seat selection at time of booking. I just figure it's a product that doesn't work for my family.
Think of the inverse, someone who doesn’t care about where they sit save money.
On the other hand, I never understood this obsession with grown people acting like it’s the end of the world if they don’t sit together. My wife and I fly a lot together - over a dozen trips this year - and she flies more frequently by herself. We both prefer window seats. We hardly ever sit together unless we can get 2 seats next to us by ourselves like on larger planes with a 3-2-3 combination or exit row seats in main.
In this particular case, it lets the parents trade childcare responsibilities back and forth during the flight, which can be a serious boon on a long flight or if one of them starts feeling unwell.
I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers.
I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that.
All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.
This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.
Playing devil's advocate here, as a parent this sounds great! Have your young children sit next to a couple strangers a few rows away: now you get some peace and quiet while other people have to deal with their seat-kicking, drink-spilling, whining, crying, bathroom trips, diaper changes, requests for entertainment, etc.
You know this is going to happen too: there are going to be some subset of parents that are not going to pay extra and will just choose to let the airline make their kids some complete stranger's problem. Hope the general public enjoys it.
And? They are your kids. Why should someone who has paid to reserve their seat have to move because you were to cheap to pay to choose your seat.
Also see, I’m not going to work extra hours because a parent can’t work late. Just because I have grown children doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life outside of work.
Ah yes I love modern society "they're your kids" until every busybody on earth calls CPS or police at the first sign of doing something they disapprove (happened to me because I shit you not, my kid is a different race and that was 'suspicious' to be a kidnapping -- thanks FOIA for the bodycam revealing that bullshit).
Or when it comes time to tax the shit out of the grown kid made possible by the massive time and money investment made by the parents, the lion's share of the total. "No no no, that was society's investment -- now they owe us those taxes as part the social contract!"
When it comes time to do the gangster shit it's all on the parent, but when it comes time to reap the benefits suddenly "we're a society."
There is a huge difference between funding education, health care etc which I’m all for paying taxes for and subsidizing your flight.
And if you expect me to defend the police or Karyns about anything, let’s just say I grew up on NWA and “F%%% the police” and my mom constantly told me that don’t think because my White friends could get away with minor criminal mischief that I could.
Well actually she said “don’t let your little white friends get you in trouble”. But close enough.
If you want to deregulate airlines you have no complaint from me. I couldn't give a shit if there's anti-kid airline who's advertising message is "Fuck dem kids."
If you're talking about a private company choosing who to subsidize once government regulations are removed, then I don't see how you have room to complain. It's not like taxes. You can charter a flight or rent a cessna to pilot if you don't agree to the private terms of carriage of anyone offering tickets.
Taxes are way worse because a guy with a gun can show up and put anyone who disagrees with the majority's idea of charity or subsidy into a tiny cage; if you disagree you can't even escape it by leaving the country because the USA has worldwide taxation. I would classify private flight subsidization as a much more ethical, moral, and wildly less violent regime than taxing people for the healthcare of others.
I personally have no problem with the current state of affairs or with the state of affairs that the airlines are proposing. I fly Delta, I don’t buy the cheapest ticket so I can cancel a flight up to the time the flight is scheduled and get a credit.
From the little I do fly other airlines, only the cheapest fares don’t at least give you credits for cancelled flights.
Every airline has a credit card that gives you free luggage where the annual fee is cheaper than the baggage fee for a couple flying round trip.
My wife and I also have status with Delta (Platinum Medallion), lounge access, TSA PreCheck, Clear etc so we can do our best to not deal with families and once a year vacationers. We live in Orlando now.
But if I did have small kids. I would definitely pay for reserve seatings.
Haha, it's very true. Everyone is an individualist when it comes to paying for kids but when it comes to social security, we should raise that to high heaven so that the current kids will be slaves to the geriatric majority.
"I don't mind paying more money in taxes" they always say, knowing full well that the majority of the incidence is on the next generation.
Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with.
Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.
With the current implementation exposed to the end customer, yes, that's required. Reserving specific seats isn't fundamental to the constraint that some people want to sit together.
Plus, the current reservation system is predatory in its own right. When booking you're dumped into a page strongly suggesting you must choose a seat, and all available options cost more than the base ticket.
Well, any half decent operator will put you next to each other and the other half at least lets you select seats during the check-in process. If that 90% certainty is not enough for you... just reserve the seats. Yes, it'll cost money, because otherwise there won't be any seats to reserve as anyone will do it.
Honestly I would be happy if the 5x the price, and I'm a parent. I hate flying with a kid and it would let me convince the wife to drive or take a boat the next time.
I basically only fly with a kid because everyone else is willing to subsidize the massive externality I impose on them.
> All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit.
I don't understand this. When you book a flight, do you not chose your seats so you sit together? Why should it be up to the airline to ensure you get a seat with your baby, that is part of planning a trip.
When I rent "the cheapest car on offer", if it is a 2 seater, and I have 3 passengers, that's on me for not planning for my passengers.
People who chose to not pick their seats (to save the $25 or whatever) shouldn't then punish people like me who paid to sit in a specific seat with specific neighbors.
Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes.
My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly.
Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip.
The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.
Let it be the airlines problem. My screaming five year old is going to generate a bunch of complaints and refunds for the airline.
The kid will get over it, and the misery of the rest of the people on the flight isn’t my problem. The stewardess can deal with it and nobody gets their peanuts.
I'd rather it be solely a problem of their profits rather than adding inconvenience to families as well. Also, my kid is going to be a lot happier and less likely to be upset and bother everyone else if both of us are there to entertain her and keep each other from being frazzled.
There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything.
i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.
Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure.
I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight.
The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from
the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.”
They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.
The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole.
Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
As I said elsewhere in the thread there are situations where it's not a luxury. A bigger point though is that it's an additional burden on parents for something childless people simply don't need to deal with. Childless people might want assigned seats, but they don't need to sit next to an infant. When a parent can't sit near their kid it negatively impacts everyone else on board the aircraft. It might result in the kid screaming more, but it'll also definitely require people to get up and shuffle around more frequently as parents come to change/feed/soothe their infants (car seats/bassinets are not supposed to be in aisle seats).
Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something.
Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs.
I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to.
> I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik
I don’t think it does. People with flexibility to be assigned to sit next to whomever and willingness to sit in middle seats ought to be able to pay less in exchange for providing that flexibility.
Their flexibility is lubricating the entire system and making it work better. Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?
What I see is people who aren’t offering that flexibility arguing that they should still get the price as if they were willing to provide it, when they are consuming rather than providing it.
Let me know if this is an unfair summarization, but the way I see it: my comments discussed how charging parents additional fees to sit near their infants is bad. Your comment proposed charging people who wanted assigned seating for that feature and allowing people who don't need that flexibility a discount. How does that address my point rather than simply re-describe the thing I've already described as the problem?
> Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?
Because that flexibility is needed more by parents and we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out. IMO we don't do nearly enough of this, like with family leave, daycare, or healthcare costs.
Because the framing of what is the standard or default matters in determining whether a problem needs solving at no cost or merely needs a solution to be available in the market.
If the standard is everyone can choose whom they sit next to (assuming seats are available), then parents are at no disadvantage. This is how air travel was for a very long time, when tickets were much more expensive and much more all-inclusive.
Now, people are seeking cheaper tickets, so the airlines propose to offer discounts for passengers to forgo some of that all-inclusive nature and if those forgone items are a good match for your needs, feel free to take advantage of them. If they're not, feel free to buy a ticket that meets your needs.
No one would think that when the USPS offers Next Day Express, Priority, and Parcel Post that a parent should get Next Day Express for the price of Priority or Parcel Post just because they're mailing something for their kid, right? When a rental car company charges a family of 6 more for a large car than a childless couple is charged for an economy car, are they violating some kind of social contract? "Use discount code BUTIHAVEFOURKIDS to rent a Suburban for the price of a Civic." A landlord charging more for a 2 BR than a 1 BR also hurts parents, but I assume most people think that's logical and proper.
> we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out
Some people want that. Not all people want that and probably no one wants it in unlimited amounts. I have kids and I'm largely indifferent on the topic beyond supporting strong K-12 public education. I do observe that some people take the notion of "we should spread out the costs of kids" way, way too far for what I think is rational.
Selfishly, I'd be perfectly fine if Basic airline tickets were made illegal for everyone. It just makes my looking at airfares online more annoying because I'll never buy a Basic fare. But, people who do find Basic fares to meet their needs ought to be allowed to have access to them, so I don't actually want them banned.
You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.
imo people asking those questions have no empathy, or they are just dumb. :)
You don’t _want_ a sleep deprived new parent on-call. A sleep deprived person is not who you want responding to an emergency, so of course others should pick up the slack temporarily. That’s what being a TEAM is all about. Kind of like playing a sport?
Now if the team is tiny the on-call impact will be a much bigger deal, and i sympathize, but in that case i’d blame management for having poor redundancy / contingency plans, NOT my colleague.
And for some reason there’s always some snarky person who chimes in with a comment like “but they chose to become parents!” A tale as old as time… so did our own parents! They chose. But i’m a human being that has empathy and i’m grateful to those who helped pick up the slack during their stressful newborn phase.
> Or we can treat people equally and not discriminate based on whether or not they have kids
Society has to treat parents differently because children are necessary for society to continue. If you make being a parent sufficiently burdensome, people will choose not to have them.
Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do. Delta said in an earnings call for instance that less than 5% choose basic economy where you can’t choose your seat.
> Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do.
It's an additional expense which isn't a luxury for parents. You can't sit far from an infant for 6+ hours because they need close attention. Also, sometimes there aren't adjacent seats for you to choose. Nevertheless, gate agents are usually able to somehow make things work. I'm not sure how they do this on a packed flight though. I didn't notice anyone being called over the PA after a gate agent moved all three of our seats to a different row on our last packed flight.
Flying is a luxury. It’s one thing to pay taxes to fund the school system, pre-K, health care, even state college. I’m all for that. But if you want to fly as a parent either suck it up and pay or don’t fly. There are parents who take long
road trips because they can’t afford to fly.
But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.
My wife and I have chosen a different flight because the seats we wanted wasn’t available.
Of course all of these opinions of mine go out of the window if it truly is an emergency. But even then, at least with Delta, they only allocate a certain number of seats as “basic economy” and once those are sold out - like they might be on a last minute flight - you have to pay a fare where you choose your seat.
You appear to have since edited your comment, but the version I replied to referred to being able to choose a seat as the luxury, not flying itself. As I've said elsewhere, flying is either a straight up necessity in some cases and a practical one in others. As I've also said in other places, people without kids can fly without need of choosing their seats.
> But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.
You can debate on whether or not flying is a necessity, but if we're flying then it's a luxury for you to sit next to your wife but it's a necessity for me to sit next to my infant.
It’s a distinction without a difference. Just like flying is a luxury. I paid to sit next to my wife. You can pay to sit next to your infant. Don’t inconvenience me because you want to save a couple of hundred dollars.
You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.
That difference matters quite a bit if you're specifically arguing about how people who are going to fly get to experience said flight.
[Edit] If you don't believe that parents have as much reason to fly as anyone else I don't think there's much point to further discussion. However if you do believe it then whether or not assigned seating specifically counts as a luxury matters quite a bit.
> You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.
Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids? That's a very good way to make having kids prohibitively expensive and part of how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'm in my late 30s and most of my friends chose not to have kids. For quite a few of those friends, they decided not to have them specifically because of how expensive it's become. You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
I didn’t say parents shouldn’t fly. I said if you want to be able to select yoir seat, pay just likf other people do.
> Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids?
So i now live 10 miles away from DisneyWorld, should my ticket prices also be more so your kids can get in free when we only have to pay for two adults? We were also able to downsize to a 1200 foot condo from a 3100 square foot house, we can spend our money on vacations instead of travel hockey like my friend.
What next? Should airlines have “kids fly free”?
> You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
I’m all for both low skill and high skill immigrants coming in where there is actually a shortage.
But play me the smallest fiddle because you don’t think you should have to pay for a ticket to reserve your seat requiring other people to move. See also, if you are too big to fit in one seat without encroaching on my space, you should also have to buy two seats - a policy many of the airlines have.
Yes, just like other people need to. Families move. Families are spread out. Families go on vacation.
We traveled so my only remaining grandparent could meet her great granddaughter before she dies, which could be any day now. Do you think we should make doing that harder just for slightly higher profits?
You're free to argue people shouldn't expect to be able to go on vacation once in a while or see family. However, not only do I think that's absurd but it doesn't address my other examples.
They don't have to go to Grandma's funeral I guess. However they will fly if they are going to make it on time. (This is a real situation for me a few years ago)
A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
They are meaningfully different scenarios, though.
If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained.
If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child.
I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.
What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.
What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience.
What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human.
And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.
There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you.
Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use.
If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.
I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to
Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.
Original title did not fit on HN so I had to edit it, origional:
>American Joins Delta, Southwest, United and Other US Airlines Push to Strip Away Travelers’ Rights and Add More Fees by Rolling Back Key Protections in New Deregulation Move
I was hoping that the pendulum would swing the other way with the scandal over too many passengers bringing out their bags on a recent AA evacuation caused by a burning tire. The push to eliminate checked bags has created a chaotic cabin environment that probably exacerbated the situation. There's no sign of it getting better either. The overcrowding of overhead bins creates a prisoners dilemma where flight attendants pressure passengers to put smaller bags under their seats, disincentivizing bringing anything but a big roller bag.
As someone who has traveled for a long time, I find two things to be true:
1. People like business travelers or those with even minimal levels of status/benefits (who don't pay for checked luggage) don't usually preferentially check bags because luggage gets delayed, it's harder to switch flights when there's a weather etc. problem, and they have to wait at the luggage carousel.
2. Hard and hard-ish roll-aboards are a menace. Especially in a world of generally more casual dress, soft-side luggage would make overheads a lot more manageable--understanding that some people really can't use shoulder bags or backpacks.
I agree with both these points, though I'm much more willing to check a bag when traveling on vacation than when traveling on business. If I were to lose a bag on vacation there wouldn't be the same consequences.
On vacation I don't have my work laptop, so it's easier to toss toiletries and an emergency change of clothes in a small under-seat carry-on bag. Besides, tourists aren't expected to smell nice and look put-together, and are more likely to have a flexible schedule that would let them go shopping if the bag doesn't turn up.
Only once has the airline lost my bag while on vacation. It was only slightly annoying and they found the bag and got it to me eventually. I've seen a coworker whose bag was lost on a business trip to India. He was stuck wearing the same clothes - a tshirt and jeans - for multiple days. This included time in the office (which had a dress code) and at least one business dinner.
>If I were to lose a bag on vacation there wouldn't be the same consequences.
Not that taking everything carryon was really an option in this case, but I had a bag misplaced after a connecting flight was canceled. This was a group hiking trip but I had at least an extra day scheduled. Still spent about $500 to minimally restock although my bag arrived at literally the last minute before one of the guides left the hotel for our one-way walk.
For me it's not having to wait at the carousel at the end, it's having to wait in that enormous line at the beginning. I really don't understand why they make it so much work just to drop off your checked bag before the flight.
Many European (and other) airports now have self-done baggage drop-off.
At Copenhagen Airport, I usually get off the metro, walk to the luggage tag machines at the end of the platform and scan my passport (or boarding pass). That prints a bag tag (and boarding pass if requested), so after sticking that to my luggage I drop it off at the counter — I put the bag on the scale/conveyor, it scans the barcode, prompts me to press "Confirm" that there's no explosives etc, and I'm done.
I scan my boarding pass to go through the barrier into the security screening, walk to the gate, and very often scan the boarding pass again to get onto the jetbridge.
I can easily go from the metro to the plane without interacting with anyone. I understand this is Scandinavian bliss.
(Exceptions are trips to countries where I need my documents to be checked; e.g. to go to the USA a checkin agent has to see my ESTA visa waiver. Oddly, going somewhere like China which requires a printed visa in my passport does work on the machine, as the machine prompts me to scan it.)
Wait, you go through security without interacting with anyone? How does that work? Other than that though, this really sounds pretty much the same as my experience in US airports in the last decade.
I missed that — yes, sometimes someone says "anything in your pockets?" or similar, and someone else beckons me to walk through the metal detector. If I'm 'randomly' checked of course I have to speak.
I found American airports less hands-off (especially security, which is considerably more hands-on than I'm used to, "Sir, I will now rub your balls"). But then I'm almost always flying internationally out of the USA, so it's not a fair comparison against domestic (Schengen) flights in Europe.
My experience with United over the past few years is that there's a pretty quick pre-registered drop line. But that doesn't apply everywhere presumably. I rarely check bags but for some types of trips (generally hiking trips for me) it's sort of unavoidable.
My wife and I are both Delta Platinum and it’s half and half. Since we always get upgraded to C+ with dedicated overhead and we board early, for non stop flights, we won’t check our bags for short getaways.
We hate lugging luggage around the airport for layovers and now that we don’t live in ATL any more, we almost always have layovers.
Plus all the additional time wasted in planing/deplaning the cabin in general as you wait for 90%+ of passengers in rows ahead of you to grab roller bags from overhead bins. Including the time wasting bottlenecks of "overhead bins full, everyone else must now gate check" guaranteed to slow the last passengers from planing and then on deplaning the crowds stuck in the jet bridge waiting for gate checked bags.
(Then there's the factor of how much time and space all that also wastes at security checkpoints.)
Checked baggage has the efficiencies of forklifts and trucks and conveyor belts. Just as airlines fixed most of the problems with those systems and got them to be efficient beasts they decided to disincentivize actually using them by charging extra for what is the cheaper cargo space. I wish an airline would have the courage to reverse the fees structure and charge for overhead bin space instead. (But then I also travel with IBS issues and my patience in deplaning has been severely tested enough that I know not everyone shares quite my annoyance at deplaning issues in particular.)
I have never had a gate checked bag where you don’t pick up your bag at baggage claim except for regional flights on small planes where even standard carry ons won’t fit in the overhead.
And for the pedantic really small planes like Sansa in Costs Rica for their 30 minute flights between San Jose and other cities.
I've seen everything from gate-checks on the carousel to a special pickup counter to leaving the bag on the tarmac covered in ice, with standard commercial airframes. It depends on airline policy and available airport infrastructure.
Yeah, it gets worse than that, too, because some airlines have multiple types of gate checks. Delta, which I've flown the most on recently, lets you gate check at the gate desk up until like 10 minutes before boarding and those get tagged like normal checked baggage, sent to a baggage car for the normal forklift-ability, and will show up at baggage claim at your final destination, but Delta also lets you gate check at the last minute by dropping it at the end of the jet bridge and those get a slightly different tag, are basically thrown into cargo by hand, and also need to be pulled out of cargo by hand and so are thrown right back onto the jet bridge on the deplaning side of the next destination, not the final one. In the case of "overhead bins full" every bag after that full point gets into that second category of jet bridge bags. (And yeah, I've seen that particular case cause some traffic jams in deplaning.)
(Delta also has a third type of "gate check" if you count the regular checkin desk silliness to try to skip bag fees by checking in with 0 bags, getting asked if you want to gate check, and then checking it at the checkin desk like checked baggage is supposed to work. That also goes to your final destination, but it's a silly process of "no I don't want to check bags" to say that "yes, I have one bag I would like to check but it's not worth your silly fees to check if you want to charge me".)
I also have met people that like the "jet bridge checked baggage" and think it a feature, not a bug. I understand there is a flexibility it offers if a connection fails or is too delayed or what have you, but the slow, artisanally hand tossed baggage part of that seems so inefficient and slow down to the rest of us, it is hard for me to not see that as a bit selfish and something that should have fees to pay for the extra labor and time involved. Also, if anything it seems a reminder that Baggage Claim got put on the wrong side of Security checkpoints in the US out of a mistake from historic airport layouts, and if you were to design the system from scratch you'd put it before leaving Security and allow people the option to choose which destinations it needs to be picked up (but still defaulting to the final one), and maybe a "recheck" desk right next to it.
But that has more to do with the realities of the plane and the airport infrastructure like you said. It’s not about airline policy with regards to checked bags vs non checked bags.
On that plane, they not only weigh your bags, they weigh the passenger to make sure the plane isn’t over the weight limit.
I was just on a flight with an Asia based airline where even the most basic fare had 2 free checked bags and some pretty limiting carry on restrictions. It was amazing how much smoother boarding was because most people only had a backpack.
i wonder if they could create a central locking mechanism where if a plane makes an emergency landing, it automatically locks all the overhead bins so passengers don't waste time trying to pick their baggage out. the only remaining thing would be smaller bags underneath the seats which i don't tihnk would delay anyone or at least not significantly as the overhead bins.
a credit instead of a refund is almost the same thing as not offering a refund. you're going to have a hard time using that refund in a manner that benefits you (not taking a flight for no reason)
Yep. I don't fly a ton, but I had a flight canceled by Alaska a couple of years ago. They refunded me so I wasn't actually out anything, but they also gave me a $100 credit in addition to the refund. I really tried, but since I don't live in Seattle and don't fly much, there was no way I could use that $100 credit without paying a whole lot of my own money too. It annoyed me to "throw away money", but the credit expired unused.
I don't think that is going to happen. Before this new-ish regulation, the airline had discretion over how to rebook you or compensate you. Now if the delay is over 3h (iirc) they have to refund you.
I think even an arbitration court would have them reimburse you if they simply canceled a flight and kept your money.
Yes, But no one wants to have to go to court or arbitration to get a refund on a service that the service provider cancelled.
If AA cancels my flight, I want my money back without having to ask for it. I don't want to have to submit an application to receive AA credits that expire in 6 months, and then have to initiate legal action to get my actual cash back. Or having them say that they rebooked me on a flight three days later so they are off the hook.
The current rules make it so that the customer has the power. I can still give AA the option of rebooking me or refunding me, but it is MY choice.
> And what percentage of people will take them to court just to get them to refund their ticket?
If there is any upside to mandatory binding final arbitration, it's that proceedings are cheaper and quicker. It might be that the arbitrators decide to universally rule in favor of the airlines amidst unambiguous evidence that the airlines took money and canceled the service, but seems unlikely.
It's also a huge risk on the part of the airlines to decide that their official policy is to stiff customers and hope it works out in arbitration.
> Why are we making it harder for the consumer to resolve an issue when the flight is clearly cancelled?
Because we elected the guy who said he would, going so far as to ensure he had a majority in both houses of Congress.
> They just want to force you into weird store-credit style refunds so that you cannot go to a competitor or choose not to travel.
Lol yes that is exactly it. I wouldn't have written that stuff above if I knew you were going to correct yourself.
My worry is that this incentivizes airlines to overlook safety concerns because grounding a risky flight or taking extra time to deal with unscheduled maintenance downtime will cost them money. It's a guaranteed certainty that some people will die because of it. I'd rather risk 300 bucks than my life.
My evidence is the extensive history of corporations prioritizing profits over safety. The relative safety of air travel is not in dispute nor is it relevant to my point. If you give companies the option to choose they will always optimize for profits over safety.
The purpose is economic extraction of the customer base. They really are asking, because they can, and that aligns with this administration's low regulation and anti consumer stance.
Edit: Comment of comment value removed. Updated to increase value. Thanks indoordin0saur, I am occasionally in the wrong gear until the psychotropics kick in.
Airlines are basically as stupid and greedy as telcos. If it were up to them, GA aircraft, UAVs, model aircraft and basically anything that wasn't military or an airliner would be banned. It has strong analogs in telcos swallowing up large amounts of spectrum "cause muh 5 gee" and just squatting on it. I'm sure safety would be in the shitter too if the FAA was less watchful (not to say it's sufficiently aggressive on the big players today).
80% would be way too much, the consumers would catch on and probably not buy tickets anymore. But don't worry, the airlines' best MBAs will be hard at work calculating the exact percentage of flights they have to fly before it starts hurting the bottom line. And once all airlines start doing it, they could bring that percentage down - what are the consumers gonna do if that's the only way to get to the destination?
They still have to offer replacement flights, and if the replacement flight isn't reasonable they have to refund. They can't just keep your money.
Don't forget that a lot of flights are business flights. Fortune 500 companies will negotiate deals with the airlines, and they will ensure that getting there matters. Sure the CEO flys the company jet, but the next level down rarely does, but they talk to the CEO and will ensure that the chosen airline will get their people there by contract (wherever there is), if the airlines start failing to get people there on time these contracts will change since the large companies have enough money to matter. Those who fly a lot (again likely for business, even small businesses sometimes have someone flying several times a week) again are people the airlines need to make happy as they will go to different airline if there are problems.
Which is to say they can screw the "common man" who rarely flies, but most of the business is people who have enough power to to to airlines that treat them well and at that point it normally isn't worth screwing anyone.
Arbitration is not automatically in their favor. It is cheaper by far than a trial (in most cases), but they need to be at least somewhat fair or the whole thing collapses next time the government changes.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
Does this mean when the passenger cancels or when the airline cancels? If it’s when the passenger chooses to cancel, this seems fine and fair: he paid for a flight; he chose not to take it. If it’s the latter, then it seems very unfair.
> Transparency of Fees
This seems patently unfair. Folks should know what they’re going to be paying ahead of time.
> Family Seating Guarantees
On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege. It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it. OTOH, families are a net benefit to society, so maybe it’s right for everyone else to pitch in a bit. Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
> [Elimination of] Accessibility Protections for Disabled Passengers
I wonder what that actually means. It could be fair (for example, folks too large for one seat purchasing two) or unfair.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege.
Agreed. I think they leave too much money on the table. Use of window shades and lavatories could be behind a subscription service as well, with Sky Comfort+ affording you the privilege of multiple lavatory visits for those who have chosen the luxury IBS lifestyle. I'll let you know if I think of anything else those pesky airline passengers take for granted.
Agreed. There should be a fee for speaking too. Some passengers are really chatty. In today's world where free speech is already being curbed, Airlines should charge a free-speech fee for passengers who plan to converse.
Separately there should be a fee for opening/closing the AC vent and using the overhead lights.
Are you a consultant for ryanair? If not, you should apply.
They tried to straight up remove the window shades, but that’s currently required by Ireland so no dice. A toilet charge has been floated but is apparently difficult both legally and technically. However given Ryanair’s usual treatment of passengers with disabilities I have no doubt a passenger with IBS would have an experience.
Ryanair talks a lot, but they mostly do it for the free PR they inevitably get when people act shocked. Almost all of their proposal are unfeasible or downright illegal and all of them should be considered bullshit until proven otherwise.
When I was young there was a discount airline named People Express that actually operated like this. In retrospect I imagine a lot of their nickel & diming would be considered standard these days, but back then it was revolutionary in both good & bad ways.
If ya made it through all three of the sentences they wrote, you'd see the comment you replied to came around to it being reasonable to give families a break on group seating.
I prefer when they recline as that always seems to give me extra knee room which is the main place that I am most cramped. When they recline the part of the chair where my knees are slides forward about in inch or 2.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege
This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another. It's seems like Mafia-tactic to seat people apart from another unless they pony up another $500 in upgrades.
I refuse to fly with United. I understand that there may not be 10 adjacent seats when flying with a big group, but spreading out a family on purpose just so you are more likely to buy an upgrade is evil.
I understand paying for checked luggage because luggage handling costs money. But purposely making the experience worse just so you can charge money for upgrades is evil.
> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another. It's seems like Mafia-tactic to seat people apart from another unless they pony up another $500 in upgrades.
The idea is that an airplane needs a certain revenue to run. Suppose it's 10k, and there are 100 passengers. Each passenger thereby pays $100.
However, some passengers (A) wish to sit in a big seat and are willing to pay for it, and others (B) don't care about seat size and are willing to give-up space for a cheaper ticket.
As such, 1 Passenger A may want to pay $250 instead to get a 30% bigger seat, while 3 passengers B give up 10% of their seat size and pay a $50 ticket. The airplane still collects $400 from 4 passengers as before, but the passengers are happier now. They have traded their individual desires, for something less valuable. A desired a bigger seat and thought $150 extra was less valuable than this bigger seat. B desired a $50 cheaper ticket and thought the smaller seat was less valuable. They traded and became happier.
You may say but nah, airlines will simply charge for bigger seats and keep the smaller seats the same price. But they don't, because they must compete with other airlines that don't. If they could do this they would've already.
For seat picking it's the same thing. A prefers to pay to sit close to a friend or partner. B doesn't care and prefers a cheaper ticket. Thus A pays a bit more, B pays a bit less.
I've always had to pay for seating as long as I can remember, I never cared enough (except long international flights), so I enjoy slightly cheaper prices than a world where there was no choice. It's not as evil as it may seem at first glance.
I’ve always wondered if it would be cheaper to just have everyone check their bags and eliminate the overhead bin. I wouldn’t be surprised if airline boarding was sped up by 2-3x this way.
As a person who regularly flies international with just a carry-on bag, I very much prefer to get out of the airport with my bag in 20 minutes after I leave the plane vs waiting who knows how long for it to arrive and hope that somebody didn't break it/into it.
Newer planes/retrofitted ones with larger overhead bins with space for everybody are the solution.
I've heard that the boarding process itself is rarely the limiting factor in flights. They're usually waiting on other plane-related things (refueling? Pre-flight checks? I can't recall the details).
If it were, they probably wouldn't be doing their 8-group boarding process that takes 20 minutes just to let people start boarding, because gate-time is expensive for them.
The current situation is the worst possible. They cost tax money, they raise ticket prices, and they make air travel worse for no benefit. If minimizing the jobs program is impossible, make them sit in a back room somewhere they can't cause backups and ruin proposals.
What do you mean there is no cost? Aisle and window seats are more valuable and can be sold for more, and this would force airlines to sell them to families without any up charge they would've received from other customers
I have no issue with airlines offering reserved seats for money. Let people buy their aisle seats and window seats and exit rows.
Most people don't give a shit where they sit, so most seats are not reserved. Traditionally, airlines tried to just put people close together when they booked together. When we check in, we just get random seats that are close together. That's okay. I'm fine with taking whatever seats no-one else wants.
If I understand United marketing correctly, they will actively sit you apart from others in your group unless you buy an upgrade. That is, instead of assigning you some of the free spots close together, you get put as far apart as possible, and they hope that you will buy an upgrade to sit close together.
Is this a per-market thing?I’m from Chicago and therefore fly United with my family all the time. The website/app lets me pick all our seats at booking time in Economy class without any up charges.
It's a benefit of "Economy" vs "Basic Economy". I saw it on an international flight. You pay 20% more and are allowed to sit with your family. At least that's how I understood their marketing. There also seem to be some exceptions for kids under 12, but I'm not sure how they work.
I don’t have any data to back this up, but I think window and aisle seats being more valuable doesn’t necessarily mean they can be sold for more.
I am very tall and I always pay for a seat with extra legroom in economy. Whenever I’m picking my seat early, almost every seat in economy is available. People could pay to reserve a window or aisle seat, but anecdotally it seems like almost no one does this. Everyone I know just tries to check in as early as possible so they can grab a good seat before they’re all taken.
I don’t think airlines are actually losing any money by seating families together. It’s not like all those window and aisle seats would have been paid for otherwise.
> > If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege
> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another.
Bin-packing is tough (look at Kubernetes!). Economically, giving folks willing to sit in a random seat an extra $10 and charging folks who want to sit together $10 is a wash.
Evil is, you know, torture and genocide, not efficient allocation of limited space.
Evil can be small and banal. Intentionally creating a negative outcome (algorithmically distance families) and charging people to escape it (preferred seating fees) certainly rhymes with a protection racket. It's purely the bad kind of capitalism, where instead of charging people for value you've created, you create new problems that only you can be paid to solve.
I'm not GP, but I imagine it has to do with efficiently scheduling pods onto nodes to optimally support workloads, some of which have a resource affinity (CPU, MEM, Disk) that can only be supported by particular nodes. In this analogy the affinity would be a strong preference for isle and window seats or sitting with family. It's easier to have the pods sort themselves according to preference than to write a daemon to do it.
> It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it.
I'd rather pay a monetary tax on my ticket to keep families organized together instead of the discomfort tax of sharing a row with parent+child that has been unexpectedly split up from their partner and is now trying to manage the child's behavior for the duration of the flight without the benefit of teamwork.
You are suddenly shaken awake from your restless, fractured sleep. A woman with a look of bright concern implores "Sir your son is watching porn!" "Huh?" She gestures to your right towards the 11 year old boy seated there. "That's not my son"
Remember, children as young as five can fly with out a parent/guardian (in the US, per AA website). So that could happen without change to regulations.
Is that a meaningful distinction, though? "Aware of" != "Actively supervising". I guess it's easier to page a flight attendant than find a parent seated elsewhere, but neither can provide active supervision.
Agreed. Flying with my own kids, I'm constantly helping them. They struggle with headphones, opening food, fastening seat belts, being reminded to use the bathroom. Worse: they spill food, have potty training accidents, kick seats, yell, cry, and get scared. It gets easier as they get older, thankfully.
With an infant, having two caregivers within reach is huge. When flying with infant in arms there's nowhere to put the kid down, you don't have a free hand. An extra set of hands to wipe up spit-up, help adjust clothing for breastfeeding, collect the diaper bag, etc is a huge help.
The idea that parents need to pay more to help their children is cruel. I would expect people seated next to a child to end up swapping, to help the parent and to escape the noisy child. But that slows down boarding as people shuffle seats and adds anxiety that we're perfectly able to resolve.
Many airlines have punitive seating algorithms (looking at you, Alaska), or pull crap like moving your seats around and separating you after you select them unless you have status (United used to, at least, since they had a practice of selling non-existing flights, then bin packing planes the day before) so without this you can end up having a breast feeding infant sitting across the plane from its family.
In essentially all cases, the kid can be put next to the parent without splitting up another parrty.
Consider twins. My understanding is that a parent may only have one infant in their arms, the other infant needs a seat.
Nevertheless, a parent may choose to book a seat for their infant to give themselves extra space. If the airline puts that seat in a different row, it defeats the purpose.
They may also book a seat so they can use a carseat, which they may be traveling with anwyay, and also because it's safer for the kid to be belted in, and most small kids are used to them and they will fall asleep in them.
If you're travelling with young children being seated together isn't a luxury, so it's basically a tax on travelling with children, and a fairly expensive one ($100 easily for a return flight perhaps for four seats?) when you've paid it for all the seats for your family.
Though when we had young children, we seriously considered not paying and enjoying having somebody else looking after our four or five year old for the flight :-)
Given it is a necessity, I feel it should either be a compulsory extra cost if you have children below a certain age or it should (ideally) be free to be seated together, so that people who do pay for particular seats know that there won't be an unsupervised child allocated to the seat next to them.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
Airline cancellations. Seeing as they're talking about making a change, I assume it's airline cancellations, since no airline will currently refund you for a passenger cancellation.
Even though I’ve flown a dozen or more airlines in my life, I actually felt true loyalty towards Southwest because of their amazing no fee policies. And it was worth playing the “check in quickly cuz there’s no assigned seats” game for all the other benefits. And we’ve flown so many flights as a family due to that. It removed all the stress from the ticket purchasing process.
This CEO is a freaking idiot. Is this an excel jockey/MBA a-hole like the kind that ran Boeing and Intel into the ground?
What’s wrong with the board that voted this idiot in?
An activist investor, Elliot, acquired a significant stake in the company and organized a shareholder revolt about Southwest's margins. Paraphrasing their presentation on the issue [0]:
Management Has Historically Ruled Out Industry-Standard Commercial Initiatives [like assigned seating, different seat classes, and checked bag fees]
The plan is to make SWA as similar as possible to other airlines to get their numbers to the same place, increasing the value of already owned shares. They don't care if it destroys SWA's customer base because they'll have sold off their stake by then.
I see they offer free cancellations and refunds for their two top-tier tickets, but can't find a reference for them offering it for all tickets. Do you have a link?
Before, you could cancel within 24 hours of boarding and get your full amount as at least a credit without any extra fee for any ticket class. That credit had no expiration. Now, there's a fee and expiration for this credit.
They want to benefit from passengers who don’t know their rights, because they won’t request a refund.
Similar things happened to family members multiple times where their initial flight (overseas) was delayed by 6 hours, they had many issues, and nobody provided information about their rights. I told them about what to ask for and voila, $1100 refund.
If the flight is delayed by 3 hours, you will get a refund if you cancel. This is great if the delay is long and there is a flight on a competing airline that would let you get out sooner.
I think charging a fee for passenger cancellation insurance is reasonable; the airline takes on a decent amount of risk if a consumer can cancel at any time.
That would be reasonable, but I think I could take it or leave it. Planes fill up more than hotels would be my guess, so they'd need a buffer window of like a month? At which point the difference between having and not having cancellation protection seems negligible to me.
I think we’re making a lot of assumptions here. For all we know one to two weeks could make a lot of sense.
I understand airlines are very feast or famine and often operate on very thin margins, but at this point I’m willing to pay a little more for the experience to not be so categorically and consistently
miserable
I think for me my main gripe with air travel is how hard it is to predict the price and how high the prices are. It takes me like a day of research to book a flight due to how careful I have to be to confirm what luggage I'm allowed/etc. And it's incredibly easy for me to get burned because aggregator sites like Google flights can't tell you eg how much a carry-on would cost, so I have to try to determine if the cheaper flight is _actually_ cheaper, etc etc. And I'm tired of having family have to pay crazy hundred dollar + fees for an extra carry on because the eco light ticket (although the ticket just says eco on it) doesn't actually include a personal item, that's only part of the eco ticket, and since you're at the counter that's going to be $100 fee for you to carry a purse onto the plane. -_- Shout out Condor.
Otherwise I find everything ok. The flights are fine -- packed but it is what it is there's high demand. I could do with/without the food if it reduced the price, I can pack my own. But otherwise I find them fine.
Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.
I know that travelling with kids is really tough. I sincerely sympathize! But it’s not a surprise that a kid needs a seat next to his parents. They know when they bought the ticket that he’ll be coming along, because they’re buying the ticket. They should select the necessary seats then.
Sure, if the airline had to move flights around then 1) they should attempt to preserve group cohesion 2) in extremis folks should negotiate. But for awhile I was getting requests from late-boarders every single time I flew. That’s not an accident: they are flying on cheap tickets and trying to get extra value. I sympathize with that too! But I pay for the value I get, and I don’t appreciate social pressure to give it away.
Then don't whine when you're sitting next to a 3 year old that has all the same justifications you do for sitting there. I don't appreciate social pressure to make your flight as comfortable as possible at my financial inconvenience.
In all seriousness I understand your point but I think it's worth considering that you're also applying social pressure.
The airline asks the age of each minor traveler when tickets are booked. The airline could perfectly well require that a kid be seated next to a caretaker. (Regardless of whether they impose an extra charge for that.)
I believe every airline should offer a basic service: when minors are traveling with an adult, they should automatically be seated together. Ideally, airlines should provide a designated family seating area to avoid situations where a child ends up sitting next to a stranger.
> Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.
What happened to "if you want it, then you have to pay for the privilege?" If you want to be sure you aren't next to a kid, just pay for a first class ticket, instead of making other people pay extra for your comfort. You knew your preferences when you bought the ticket, after all. Select the seat you find necessary. /s
The point being that the status quo rolls dice that make everyone unhappy, and there are options for everyone to avoid it by paying extra. Those options are priced by the people creating the situation in order to make a maximally profitable 'pay to avoid this' scenario. I always pay for my family to get together, but blame the airline for making you uncomfortable, not the family.
I’ve definitely selected adjacent seats in the past, then ended up separated the day of the flight. Even if it’s a couple, it’s probably the airline’s fault.
I solved the problem by preferring southwest, but their new CEO is an a*hole, and instead of raising ticket prices $50 a seat is adding assigned seating, removing legroom, charging for bags, adding ticket change fees, etc, etc.
> Even if it’s a couple, it’s probably the airline’s fault.
Citation needed. These things happen, and the airline has some responsibility. But there's plenty of "playing dumb". Cabin crew: "You have a basic economy seat, which means you didn't get seat selection". "I didn't know!" "There's a big blue warning that pops up when you do this with a child passenger, making you acknowledge it..." "..."
Indeed, having children should have tiny nickel and dime costs all throughout your life in a million different ways. It should be the norm that just trying to raise the next generation costs you time, energy, effort, and money just to do normal day to day things, and it should especially be harder for you because you dared to have children.
Some of us are just trying to survive financially or couldn't care less what you think.
Tough luck then buddy. Have fun with the kids.
There has to be some kind of middle ground here, imo. Nobody wants to sit next to kids. Families don't want to be penalized financially anymore than they already are for providing a benefit to society. We don't need to further disincentivize families and further our declining birth rates. At the same time it's wildly unfair to ask people to switch seats when they've paid for them (or even if they haven't).
Paying for a group to sit together is really just a roundabout way of charging extra for the middle seat that solo travelers don't want. There's something gross about it, creating a market price for a nonexistent good.
Random family seating anecdote. A couple of years ago, we were on vacation and my wife had to go home early to tend for a sick pet. My daughter and I also re-arranged our flight to get home early, and ended up in like the D boarding group (on Southwest). So we're getting on the plane and we're almost dead last, and there are very few seats left together anywhere. My 6 yr old daughter was not really emotionally equipped to sit alone at that point.
We get about 2/3 of the down and there's now nothing, so I say -- with some desperation -- "If someone would be willing to switch seats so my daughter and I can sit together I'll give you $20." A guy says "I don't want the money but I'll switch."
Which sort of shows that if you're not a jerk, and you ask nicely, often people will go out of their way to help you.
Families who seem to expect other passengers to move, especially when there's assigned seating, are another story, and deserve the condemnation they get, IMHO.
>On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege. It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it. OTOH, families are a net benefit to society, so maybe it’s right for everyone else to pitch in a bit. Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
I don't understand, are people buying random tickets and hoping to be put together once on the plane? I've literally only bought assigned seats on flights except on Southwest.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege.
What privilege? Assigning seats next to each other costs airlines next to nothing (assuming they assign seats in the first place, which almost all of them do).
I ask to switch sometimes, but I always offer them the better seat and aisle-for-aisle or window-for-window. You’re sitting next to a stranger either way and I assure you that you don’t want to be sitting next to my wife when I’m the one carrying much of the gear. I’ll be passing her stuff constantly.
> Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
This is my absolute pet hate. Most of the airlines I fly frequently with specifically throw up a dialog box making you acknowledge "I have no seat selection options with this fare", yet every flight, I'll see people doing this stupid seat dance. No, I chose the seat I wanted for a reason.
I know way too many parents who take the stance of not bothering to pay for assigned seating, on the assumption that people will move around to accommodate them.
As someone who pays for an assigned seat so I can sit where I want, this annoys the crap out of me as now they expect people like me to move.
When I point this out, their response is "why should I pay for that?"
I agree with the airlines here but if it makes life overall less stressful for all to put families together due to the bad behavior of those parents, I'm fine with it.
Despite flying at least 10-15 times a month on average, I have actually never seen this happen. Reddit suggests that there is an epidemic of it. The actual problem is an epidemic of terminally online dipshits making mountains out of molehills.
And yet as someone who only flies 10-15 times a year and being a terminally online dipshit, I have seen this happen. Not like one of those TikTok videos with fisticuffs, mind you.
I remember as I was annoyed that this whole thing was holding up my flight. Family asked someone to move, they declined, family kept insisting. Boarding line was getting held up due to this. FA arrives, starts imploring the man to move his seat, obviously just trying to get boarding complete so we can all move on with our lives. Eventually the man got up & changed.
And I'll smile back knowing you're about to have a really great flight with my 3 year old :)
(to be clear, I don't do this personally and pay extra to sit together but I do hope people start parking their kids all over the plane since that's what we all seem to want! It's tempting.)
So according to you: they should give up their paid seat so that you don't have to pay for assigned seats, even when you know way in advance that you are traveling with a 3 yr old?
Let's ignore special cases where you didn't have a chance to buy assigned seats, and focus on the vastly more common scenario where parents can easily pay to ensure seats of their choice.
Yes, it's nickel and diming by the airlines to make all seat assignments paid. And hating airlines is completely justified.
But I find the entitlement of parents, that other passengers should accommodate their parsimonious preferences, just amazing.
Flying has become such a terrible experience that I avoid it all costs. I'd love to take more trips, but the service is so poor that I can't justify supporting it more than absolutely necessary. I doubt anything will change though, the majority of other people seem to not really care.
I'm with you. If I can't drive there, I don't go. Between the TSA, cramped seats, fees, unhelpful staff, angry passengers, angry staff, turbulence, the lousy food and dealing with carry-ons/luggage -- it's not worth it (for me, personally). My last flight was 2019 and I don't miss it at all.
We take fewer, but longer, vacations, and use the extra time to drive to our destination. We try to avoid freeways as much as possible so we can see smaller places. We make vague plans and stop when we get tired or hungry.
I know it won't work for everybody, but it works for us and I love it.
Either it's a business necessity or it's a "tax" on recreational vacations once or twice a year. In semi-retirement I've told many people my goal is to keep traveling but arrange things so I spend less time in airports and planes. Of course, I can spend more money to make longer flights less onerous.
As annoying as it is to be nickel and dimed I really can't complain when thinking about what is actually on offer. If I told my ancestors I was unhappy about traveling 2000 miles in 5 hours for $250 they'd rightfully slap me over the head. What a historically unprecedented capability for our species to end up on the opposite side of the planet in about a half a day.
Just a few short months ago we had an administration that pushed and got some fair rules created. It is crazy to me that people can’t see how transparently anti-consumer the current administration is.
This is part of the reason I don't fly so much anymore. In the last 10 flights I flew, only 2 arrived on time. For one flight I was delayed in D/FW for 72 hours. I haven't had a flight on United that wasn't canceled or rescheduled or I was bumped in about 10 years. And the behaviour of the airlines has been getting MUCH worse over time. The Alaska flight from DFW to SEA that was delayed 72 hours... They originally weren't going to refund me for canceling it. I had to get a lawyer involved. I should not have to get a lawyer and a local TV news crew involved to reschedule a canceled flight.
I drive a lot more these days and if Amtrak was better I would take the train more often. I get to catch up on podcasts while driving and usually do it over the weekend so I can stop and see out-of-the-way roadside attractions. Before driving I-80 between Reno and Salt Lake, I never realized how empty some sections of the country are.
I'd be curious to hear if this is happening in Europe or Asia.
I flew a LOT pre-covid, and still more than average post-covid (2-4 times a year), and primarily via United (thanks to racked-up miles from the Continental days) out of Houston/NYC/London, and I have never had any issues with delays or cancellations - In 2009, a Continental flight did have me circling IAH for 2 hours while they troubleshot a landing gear malfunction before landing again and switching planes, though, but that is the only issue I remember, and I was flying 2-5 flights/week at that point between HOU/NYC/LAX/DEN.
The handful of times I've flown Southwest have been slightly less than perfect, but some of that was user error not understanding how Southwest worked compared to normal carriers.
I don't want to discount yours, or the thousands upon thousands of reports about United or Southwest, but in my experience, it has been pretty solid on both counts.
I'm flying out of the west and have to go through SLC or DEN when flying United. It's ALWAYS a PITA. Now that I think about it... I had a segment a couple years ago on United from JAX to ORD that was delayed only 5 minutes and wound up arriving 5 minutes early, so maybe east of the Rockies things are better. And my brother tells me international flights on Untied through SFO to Asia are generally pretty stable.
I bet if I looked at where flights originated, United is doing a East to West pattern and there are just fewer opportunities for cascading delays to impact people getting on the plane in the east. Comparing with Alaska, which has other problems, but hasn't canceled too many flights on me, I bet most of the flights I take originate out of SEA going south or east, so you don't have that same pattern.
Also... Southwest... I remember when it was a good airline. Just another example of what hedge funds can do to you. FWIW, they have a train at DFW now that will take you to either downtown Ft. Worth or downtown Dallas (or even Las Colinas. Or DENTON. I took a train from DFW to "downtown" DENTON once!!! The wonders never cease.) I would love to see LUV field step up it's mass trans game.
Now that you are saying that, I wonder if HOU to LAX or LAS is better served because it stays south of the Rockies. And since I've almost always been based out of Houston, or when I lived in NYC, flying home to HOU or vacationing in DEN, those flights never had to cross the Rockies.
i’m hard-pressed to think of an industry whose financial principles i’m more skeptical of than the airline industry. post-9/11 the industry cratered and they said they needed to add fees to keep from going bankrupt. united created ted, their own low-cost no-frills carrier which was actually decent. once air travel recovered, they (airlines, in general) kept the fees and have been turning record profits ever since. united dumped ted so that they could return to focus on squeezing customers there.
i love travel but i hate dealing with airlines. their executives rank up there with health insurance as some of my least favorite personalities.
and one last thing, other than (eventually) telecom way back in the 80s, has there ever been an industry whose deregulation has been a net win for consumers? i’m genuinely curious and not asking sarcastically
also, don’t forget (well known fact) that passengers paying for premium economy and business class seats are the most profitable for the airlines - by far. Aside from profits from credit card rewards programs.
so the profit margin on economy tickets is likely even smaller than 5.5%!
I have no doubt that if they could fill the plane with 200 business class travelers they would.
But that group simply isn't big enough outside of routes to New York or Shanghai.
The 747 became the queen of the skies because it carried 400 tourists to Málaga, Okinawa and Ft Lauderdale.
The fees will only bring in extra revenue if they're a surprise, or some sort of impulse buy. I'm not sure that'll keep happening.
We're already at the point where people don't trust the listed price of flights and hotel bookings (Vegas has made hotel resort fees globally famous). It just seems the long term result is everyone will use some app to calculate the real cost of their trip, and what those apps display will be the real list price.
The airlines and the FAA have been reducing seat size and weight for "safety reasons". 21" width minimum required in 1995 only 18" width in 2025. These seat requirements directly corrolate to fuel cost savings, and passenger density. Simple statistical manipulation with the increase in passengers shrinks the fatality and accident rate because the sample is larger. The airlines are to the FAA as what wall street is to the SEC.
> Instead of the clear, itemized pricing system that passengers currently rely on, airlines could hide fees until later in the booking process…
They call what we have now “clear”? Where when looking at a page of flights I don’t know how much the multitude of economy/economy+/economy++/premium economy/business/business++ seats will cost until I click on each flight? Where every carrier offers slightly different variations of these seats such that I can’t cross-shop on Google Flights?
Is that the clear and transparent system the airlines are complaining about?
What they want is a return to the old pre-Obama days where all the taxes and mandatory fees (government and stuff they made up) were only displayed at check out. Kind of like resort fees on hotels.
It absolutely was not worse in the 80s. Unless you mean more expensive. Yes. It DEFINITELY was more expensive. When I booked through a travel agent or over the phone with the airline, the fees were pretty transparent. I sorta feel for the airlines here because before deregulation they had to commit to unprofitable routes before they realized HOW unprofitable they would be. That cost was spread over the profitable routes and ultimately everything was more expensive. But... oh man... remember when you could get on a flight where only about 25% of the seats were filled and the food wasn't great, but was free? I remember being able to lift the arm-rests on seats up and stretch out and take a nap on the plane. Those were the days. Before American's MD/SD-80s started falling out of the sky, I would fly out to DFW from SJC each week and it was delightful.
And baggage handling systems are much better than the 80s. It's been 5 years since an airline has lost checked luggage for me. But of course, it's been 5 years since I checked luggage, so who knows? I really miss Yamato 宅配便 from when I lived in Japan. Americans really don't know how to travel correctly.
Meh. The dollar is probably going to be devalued soon so the dream of air travel for the typical American will likely only be in the rear-view mirror. We'll all be lost in wistful nostalgia about the time when normal people could afford air travel.
So... SOME things were worse in the 80s/90s. Not all things related to traveling.
> It's been 5 years since an airline has lost checked luggage for me.
It hasn't even been two weeks for me, although my luggage arrived the next day. I remember on Slashdot hearing the advice of always packing a firearm (even a starter pistol) in checked luggage when traveling domestically—not only is it legal, but the BATFE gets involved if the airline loses your luggage, so the airline is very careful not to lose your luggage.
No sure why this comment got downvoted. The 90s were more of no hidden fees at all. You paid the ticket, and that's it. Usually 2 baggages were included in the flight (standard), and food was free. US inland trips had crappy snacks, and some soda, but international ones all had food and drinks, including alcoholic ones.
Prices of tickets were more expensive for sure, so air travel was more of a luxury.
The era of the hidden fees started during the late Bush era, and with the advents of online booking, and with the rise of the 'cheap airlines' like RyanAir, Spirit, etc...
They had hidden fees as part of their busisness model. The larger carriers started following suit with more restricitons for the cheapest base tickets (no luggage) and more fees for things that used to be included before.
This is completely different from the 90s, which you paid and things were more upfront.
I could have gotten my decades wrong. I just remember not being able to get refunds by default, and then it was a glorious past several years where JetBlue and southwest would automagically refund my tickets back to my credit card.
I know that "me too" comments are frowned upon, but I really feel the need to chime in here. Brazil is my favorite movie of all time. It is eerily prescient. It's important to keep in mind while watching it today that it was made forty years ago.
And yes, the director's cut. Absolutely the director's cut.
I'm not sure why you think that would've helped. A lot of the people who won't shut up about 1984 and Ayn Rand still vote for the closest thing to monarchy they can find on their ballots.
I think most of them would say that right up until they could actually feel the hunger. People spend hundreds of dollars on drugs that just make them less hungry so they eat less. So I don't think so.
Okay - democrats will push us in 1984 dystopia where they force you to accept that reality is what they tell you, and republicans will push us in low life high tech Cyberpunk dystopia where corporations reign supreme. Choose your poison.
Maybe the one where biological sex is imaginary. Or the one where Biden's health is good enough for another four years. You pick (or keep looking the other way and losing, to the detriment of far more important issues).
FWIW, like "conservatives" the stereotypes are not universal. They may not even be typical.
Biological sex clearly is not a fiction; we have lots of evidence that it's not something you choose. It's also not necessarily binary, even in humans, although it is mostly binary.
I also did not believe that Biden was ready for four more years, but then again, what choice did I have? I would not have voted for Trump under any circumstances, and sitting it out would be giving my vote away.
You're painting with a rather broad brush. You must have at least a few liberals in your life with whom you can compare notes.
We are talking about the same hepatotoxic compound that is absurdly easy to OD on but it gives negligible relief on stuff you should just power trough? That anecdotal - is barely better than a pacebo?
Personally - I think that the two main drivers of autism are people having kids later and too high rates of smart people intermarriage.
Of course Trump should not have said Tylenol, but paracetamol.
And there are some very mild hints in the data that they are correlated, but not enough sigmas.
And of course it could be Tylenol and something else with which ot interacts. And autism is so hard to be linked to anything because of how big the umbrella is and that we have such high delay to diagnosis that we will never know. Not taking medications when not really necessary is probably a good precaution principle
This is a pro level feature set. I don't think most flyers feel bilked that they can't do this. Absolute price sensitivity (meaning bottom line, not "cheapest business class") is the factor for most people and that is easy to see on any of the flight search engines.
For most perhaps, but I want to know what I'll really pay. I already know I'm going to check luggage (or not, but now that I have kids and am going for longer vacations checked bags is not something I'll do without), so I want to see the price with checked bags. Likewise I know I'm willing to pay for the legroom of economy plus (the rest of my family doesn't care, though my kids are soon hit their final growth and soon will). I've just added $1000 to my actually price, but all I see is the per person ticket price with no options...
There is a reason I took Amtrak last vacation. Too bad they doen't go do where my next vacation will be.
Well rule #1 is never to book a flight on a third party travel portal. When things go wrong, you now have to deal with the travel portal and the airline.
Many people will do things like use Google Travel to narrow down an initial set of potential flights based on times & cost, and then go to the individual airlines from there to book things. The GPs post is still a problem in this scenario.
That seems like a Google problem because of a poor interface. Unless you want each airline to standardize their offerings. Even then their would be differences based on loyalty programs, which airline you have a credit card for etc.
The legislation nor the regulations were geared toward third party aggregators.
Google Flights isn’t a third party portal! It takes you directly to the airline web site to book. It attempts to estimate the fare price but that’s becoming increasingly difficult with variably priced seats and other “gotcha” expenses that get figured in deep into the booking flow.
For domestic flights, perhaps. It routinely refers me to third party OTAs for the cheapest prices on flights to less common international destinations.
And in that case, this was never regulated by the government. The airlines shouldn’t be responsible for how their products are presented on a random aggregator.
FWIW, at least as of today, American Airlines' website attempts to show you round trip prices.
When choosing your outbound leg(s), they show a price inclusive of the cheapest return journey on the day you selected to return using the class of service on your outbound leg. So, there's all sorts of ways for it to be incorrect - maybe you want a different class of service, maybe the cheapest return has a stop but you'd like the direct, etc. - but it's still really useful for figuring out the best options for your flights.
Kayak.com does it... it's very much a UX choice of whether to show combinations of flights at a given "level" (economy/main/1st class) or instead dedicate the space to showing the prices at all levels, and only show a flight at a time.
The context is making pricing more opaque than it needs to be in order to earn more money.
I don’t understand how it could be made simpler, unless you want every flight to cost the same, which is stupid. Hence the complaint does not make sense.
There might be other factors to consider, such as seat density and maintenance costs. Plus that deregulation was a massive change compared to whether or not they can use the AirBnB price quote model.
The cost savings has also come from efficiency gains like winglets & jet bridges, and service reductions like going from meal service to snacks to nothing, the removal of amenities (remember playing cards and wing pins for kids?), little or no in-flight entertainment, etc.
While US airlines are lobbying to roll back passenger protections and add fees, the EU is moving the opposite way - now pushing rules to standardize free carry-on and checked baggage sizes across all airlines[0]
The entire industry generates money by means of dark patterns. Per my interactions with people, almost 100% of consumers are constantly pissed off at the unending deception. Given this is their modus operandi, I don't trust a word the industry tells me.
I agree that transparency is important. All charges known up front.
That said, I think a fundamental problem is that sir travel is too cheap. That's the motivation behind all the nutty fees.
Surely there would be a market for an airline (or a class of seating) where you get a decent seat, with no gimmicks and up-charges? And not for triple the price like business class?
Isn't this just regular seating (of any class) on one of the non-discount airlines?
I fly a couple times a month with Alaska or Delta, economy tickets only, and this is always my experience. No weird fees, price known up front, the seat is fine, etc.
"For many years, all flights featured 2-by-2 leather seating (in aircraft usually fitted with 3-2 seating), ample legroom, complimentary gourmet meals, and warm chocolate chip cookies. This made the airline popular with business travelers. In addition, Midwest Express operated a sizable executive charter operation with a specially configured DC-9."
In Canada, we've already learned to always fly a European airline when possible. We have some legal protections but Canadian airlines are happy to put people on a complaint waiting list instead of doing anything - it's pretty laughable. As of August, there's 85k complaints waiting. It's a 1.5-2 years wait.
There is a 90 day decision timeframe starting from the time of submitting a complaint.
But note:
> Due to a high volume of complaints, there will be a delay between when a complaint is submitted and waits in the queue and when the complaint process will start.
> Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges.
I'm against rolling back all of the other ones mentioned, but this one, I don't have a problem with charging a fee to be seated together. Most airlines let you pay to pick seats anyway.
* Automatic Refunds for Cancellations: Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. Passengers may instead receive only vouchers or no compensation at all, leaving them without recourse in the event of a major flight disruption.
* Transparency of Fees: The airlines also aim to strip away rules that require them to disclose all fees (like baggage, seat assignments, and service charges) upfront. Instead of the clear, itemized pricing system that passengers currently rely on, airlines could hide fees until later in the booking process, making the true cost of a ticket much higher than expected.
* Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
* Accessibility Protections for Disabled Passengers: The deregulation proposal also targets protections for disabled passengers, weakening their access to support and assistance during air travel.
There is not coverage beyond one adult already in the US. With an additional adult and one child, the airlines already adds in fees. It’s also non-transparent when booking that they have made sure the easy path is the charged path, especially now that airlines make you pay to guarantee being seated together prior to flight checkin 24 hours in advance of takeoff.
> Automatic Refunds for Cancellations: Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. Passengers may instead receive only vouchers or no compensation at all, leaving them without recourse in the event of a major flight disruption.
Basically half of flights I've ever booked have had a cancellation. Usually the airline customer service had to rebook a new itinerary for the same purpose, but once in the past year they had to issue a refund because all possible routes went through DFW and they had lightning, which they have all the time.
It's absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that you should be able to take someone's money and not render services. That's a fundamental part of commerce.
Yeah; I wonder if this is going to lead to chargebacks.
I wonder if there are any anti-retaliation provisions, or if they’ll just have a special no-fly list for people they sold non-existent flights to, and that refused to pay up.
They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.
>Basically half of flights I've ever booked have had a cancellation.
You would seem to be a very unlucky person. My record is somewhere in the low single digits. Obviously, my percentage of flights with some delays has been somewhat higher.
> * Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
Capitalist money-making idea: guarantee young children are seated as far away as possible from their parents if the fee is not paid, then offer to collect the fee from other passengers seated next to the child. Double the cost if it's a baby.
I would pay more for an announcement-free flight. I watch the safety briefing ahead of time, and nobody speaks over the insanely-loud PA system the entire time I'm on the airplane.
US airlines discovered, during and after covid, that shipping prices were astronomical for some materials and some destinations. The airlines began taking on more packages, and less people. Now the airlines are allowing passengers to compete with these new package-pound-per-dollar rates. It's not unexpected. Now the safety measures are getting in the way of the package-pound-per-dollar and the airlines are seeking a way to scurry out from under these safety measures.
This is undesirable behavior, but how can a meat-package compete with a rare-metals, rare-earths, or even small aluminum shipment? The cost of shipping goods has risen astronomically since covid. Meat-packages now must compete. We're losing the competition.
I think the airlines don’t realize that all the rules in place now make flying more tolerable and even enjoyable.
If the airlines jerk me around I’m more likely to just not buy a ticket and stay home. If they make it a great experience it’s something I’m going to look forward to.
I fly a lot and let me put in context one of the “protections” as far as parents being seated with children or at least how it works on Delta.
If you buy their lowest fare - which they try their best to steer you away from and they say prominently in big bold type avive where you order your ticket that you will not be able to choose your seat - you cannot in fact choose your seat. Then parents complain and people who did pay to choose their seat are forced to move so kids can sit with their parents.
The rest of the items that the airline wants to roll back are foot guns for infrequent travelers.
Ironically in Europe we have some decent regulation for airlines, but the public train operating companies refuse to do the same for trains. We need to have some of those same protection and transparency requirements for train companies as well.
But the governments of the big operating companies have vetoed this so far. Sometimes deregulation actually makes it easier to implement regulation.
Train operators aren't as strictly regulated because they can't do as much harm, both in terms of the inherent catastraophic consequences of air travel disasters for passengers and bystanders, and in terms of the financial risk that passengers take on by purchasing a ticket. A no-refunds-for-cancellations policy on a $100 intercity train ticket that rarely ever cancels hits different from a $400 flight itinerary that cancels multiple times a week because of normal weather.
I don't think that's true. If you book a connection that involves multiple high speed trains across multiple country you can easily pay 1000s of $. Its actually more then many direct flights in Europe.
And for example if you take TGV from Paris to the German border, and you have to get on an ICE. If the TGV is late, you miss the connection to the ICE, and have to sleep in the border town, TGV doesn't have to pay.
And missing connection is quite common, specially because Germany is ... not very German.
In terms of safety, a train accident can kill 100s of people. They just don't happen very often.
> the public train operating companies refuse to do the same for trains. We need to have some of those same protection and transparency requirements for train companies as well.
On a completely unrelated note, I recently noticed that Deutsche Bahn seems to have some of their train schedules staggered by 58 minutes instead of one hour – which means that the 25% refund for a delayed arrival due to a missed connection that didn't wait will usually not kick in :)
I didn't say there was no regulation what so ever. But there were multiple efforts of increasing it that was blocked. And what I specifically noted that the rights are weaker then for airlines.
If your airline is delayed and you miss a connection, you will get a hotel for the night. In a train, you can get that.
Airlines are forced to compete on price and have to publicly list prices and make that accessible to 3rd parties. Train companies do everything in their power to silo as much as they can to force costumers into booking threw their app.
> Airlines are forced to compete on price and have to publicly list prices
Which regulation requires airlines to do so? I was under the impression that airlines mainly make their inventory available via GDSes for historical reasons (for decades before direct online booking, airlines would sell most of their tickets through travel agents, which needed unified interfaces).
There are some low-cost airlines that don't embrace GDSes and force you to use their app as well (I've been bitten by that once when booking through a "non-cooperative OTA/reseller and not being able to access my boarding pass), and conversely, I think some train connections are selling tickets to travel agencies these days.
> If your airline is delayed and you miss a connection, you will get a hotel for the night. In a train, you can get that.
The rest of the world's already discovered an easy out: negotiate by promising to do what you've already been doing for the past decade. As long as he hasn't been fed some idea to fixate on, he's an easy mark that can be placated by literally anything.
Canada just allowed the USA to have control over their nuclear plants and waste for 20 years.
South Korea had to publicly come out and say they wanted to accept Trump's deal, but it had to have some concessions or else they would go into economic collapse!
And the EU just allowed something like 30% more access from USA food which was previously considered not fit for human consumption under their health laws right? Please correct my figures if they're wrong.
I echo what some already stated. I think this topic if real needs to be known. Problem is that I cannot find any reference where this information is coming from.
Give me a link, document, reference, or something to back up the claims. Otherwise it comes across as FUD.
Interesting. The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers.
I suppose we’ve just given up on the concept of trying to do anything but nakedly extract profit at any cost. You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that.
Edit: I mean short-term profits. As a shareholder I would prefer long-term profits via competition and diversification.
Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much.
Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff.
You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines.
>they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much
Basically. I have used a combination of miles and co-pays to upgrade to business trans-Pacific. But most of the time going from the east coast US to Europe (especially when I can do it without a red-eye to London), I end up thinking of all the nice stuff I could do with $5K at the cost of sort of a miserable flight.
It's not that I couldn't splurge but there are other things I'd generally prefer to splurge on.
One reason flights are more miserable is planes are more heavily loaded. Before deregulation, planes were usually ~50% full. Today in the US, it's about 84%.
This is directly correlated with airfares. Were planes as sparsely loaded now as they were then then fares would be correspondingly higher. But in a deregulated environment there's a very strong incentive for increased economic efficiency to keep the fares competitive.
I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both.
This is pretty much false. If you compare inflation adjusted cost you now get a far better service for the same price, and you get access at a price that literally wasn't possible before.
> and flying is miserable
It isn't. I have flowing with budget airlines in Europe and its, basically fine. Not luxury but really its incredibly value.
On the same price as you did before, you now get luxury.
> Crashes are way up this year.
What the fuck does 'this year' have to do with it when we are talking about something that happened in around the 1980s.
Total safety is up massively, and per passenger safety is up by an absurd amount.
Any counter-argument to this is literally not credible.
> The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers.
What the actual F? Deregulation of airlines was massively beneficial to consumers.
"Base ticket prices have declined steadily since deregulation.[15] The inflation-adjusted 1982 constant dollar yield for airlines has fallen from 12.3 cents in 1978 to 7.9 cents in 1997,[16] and the inflation-adjusted real price of flying fell 44.9% from 1978 to 2011.[17] Along with a rising U.S. population[18] and the increasing demand of workforce mobility, these trends were some of the catalysts for dramatic expansion in passenger miles flown, increasing from 250 million passenger miles in 1978 to 750 million passenger miles in 2005.[19]"
How do the real price reductions compare to the rest of the world? Computers automated away a ton of airline jobs, and fuel economy has increased.
Also, are those prices apples to apples with pre-deregulation tickets?
Like, can I just walk up to the terminal, same day, pay that price, and get the equivalent of business class on the plane, and still pay 44% less than real 1978 prices?
Base ticket prices doesn’t seem like a great metric, not that I have a better trivial to measure metric off the top of my head (maybe leg room?), but competition has certainly gone down since deregulation.
Don't forget that it was Delta airlines that lobbied the Biden administration that got CDC to reduce isolation duration. Both administrations are deadly liars. When it comes to the airlines, the last administration's deregulation killed people, a lot of them. Not that if Trump was in power he would have done anything different.
One of my biggest regrets is not travelling the length and breadth of the US two decades ago when I had an opportunity.
What with orange two-chins in charge, MAGA, ICE, deregulation across the board, and the general shit-housery that seems to be going on over there, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to attempt it again in my lifetime ... it's not the actual travel that is the issue, it would be the non-stop gag-reflex on landing ...
Is it just me or is this an awful “article”? It mention deregulation but doesn’t point to what specific regulations have been removed. I took a Delta flight 2 weeks ago (one that supposedly had implemented all of these draconian rollbacks) and had the same experience I’ve had for the past 10 years:
- price of the ticket was as advertised
- a checked bag was an option at the same price it has always been.
- I was able to assign a seat next to my husband without additional fees.
Now while this flight was not cancelled, I’ve had to reschedule some flights with Delta due to illness previously and they just gave me a 100% credit for the cost of the flight that was easy to use.
The only contrast for cancellation I know is the nightmare of Air Canada. In the past I’ve had flights get cancelled and only got “vouchers” that could only be used by calling a specific number that took 1 hour+ and were not applicable for taxes (you know half the cost of a Canadian Airline Ticket), and would be lost of not fully used in one purchases
Air Canada vouchers also expire in one year. I had the misfortune of having a flight cancelled at the beginning of COVID. They never refunded me, because apparently you had to go fill a form to apply for a refund within a few days of cancellation. Air Canada is the worst.
I honestly think it's pretty amazing how cheap air travel already is in the USA and Europe. It explains why we're seeing all time highs for air travel.
The air industry seems like a good example of just the right level of regulation: There's tons of competition, different pricing tiers with their corresponding levels of quality, and a lot of dynamism combined with a good set of consumer base regulations (24 hour cancellation period, for example).
This might be the case if all your travel boils down to off season direct flights between major airports.
In my experience, it has been rapidly going up in price and down in quality since the end of the pandemic. You have very few protections as a passenger, and while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue with the way support lines work with airlines.
To add insult to the injury, look up the history of bailouts airlines have received.
> while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue
Are you in the US? In the EU there are many websites that help you get a cancellation/delay refund, they require little more than your boarding pass, and they work very well for a small (sometimes none) fee. The fee is taken from your refund so if you don't get one, you don't have to pay anything.
I've had four overnight delays on three transatlantic trips this year. Fortunately, EU passenger compensation rules applied to three of them; the airline must pay each delayed passenger 600€ or convince them to take a more compelling non-cash offer.
I'm not for heavily regulating non-safety details of how most industries do business, but I do think it's fair to demand the true price up front and compensation when the airline doesn't provide the service it sold for reasons within its control.
Right, I've had train companies put me in a taxi, and just eat the price of a taxi to wherever because if you want to sell tickets to travel to X, and then oops you can't get me to X well, I didn't buy your "regret" that you can't do that - I bought travel to X, so if that's still possible you'd better make it happen and too bad if that's not profitable.
I got an email from the train company that according to their records I had a delay and they put a link in it to a online form to get my money back.
I was positively surprised at their proactive communication. The money was on my account within the week!
In Italy, for regional trains, since 2025 Trenitalia gives the reimboursement automatically to your credit card if you purchased the ticket electronically. [1]
[1] https://www.firstonline.info/en/trenitalia-rimborsi-automati...
There was a year I made more money from flying than I spent, because I kept flying ryanair or easyjet and I kept getting massive delays (one was a 20h delay, in which I spent the night at the airport squatting some of the couches in a cafe in the terminal, because small delays kept being slowly pushed on us, and we also spent 2h waiting in the final plane for it to take off, no A/C and they refused to give us water threatening to call the cops on us if we did get water bottles ourselves, great experience!)
Ryanair is the most punctual airline tho
Ryanair has the very sleazy habit if saying things like "we have just landed at X, note how we are 5 minutes ahead of schedule!" over the PA.
However, they don't make a peep when the flight lands with a delay.
Absolutely not in my experience, maybe I've just been really unlucky but I can't remember more than 1 Ryanair flight I've been on that was actually on time. Most delayed by less than 4 hours, but delayed.
Making flying even crappier doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Regulations that put a floor on how crappy airlines can be should be pretty neutral on competition since all the airlines would have the same rules.
That's not to say all rules are a good idea, even rules that raise quality -- raising the floor raises prices, and if the floor is raised higher than necessary, prices are higher than necessary too, making flying less affordable. Set the floor too low and people fly less because it's too crappy. Set the floor too high and people fly less because it's too expensive. You're looking for the balance point.
IMO, the floor is too low right now. I think it's a mistake to try to lower it.
> Set the floor too low and people fly less because it's too crappy.
Seems like a great opportunity for an airline to be less crappy and make a lot of money selling tickets to all those people who are "flying less" on other airlines, no?
So the question then becomes why hasn't someone done that already, if the floor really is "too low"?
> no?
No. Because people don't know how crappy it will be when they book.
They're just juggling prices and scheduled times.
People who aren't flying very frequently and don't have a trustworthy source of knowledgeable recommendations -- that is, a substantial majority of people -- will never take enough flights to know which airlines are worth $X more. If they even have many options for their route and time.
The last flight I was on was American Airlines. We waited in the plane while they tried to figure out to start it because the auxiliary power unit was out, and the generator American uses to start planes with no APU was also broken, so they had to borrow one from another airline. And no APU also meant no air conditioning until the plane is started.
It was only a 30 minute delay but the heat made it miserable.
I paid for a name brand airline, paid to choose a decent seat, could have paid for more upgrades, but no amount of money short could prevent me from waiting out a delay in a hot cabin because the airline failed to maintain their equipment. The folks in first class faced the same miserable heat.
It's a market for lemons. Paying more doesn't assure quality, it just means you spent more money to get screwed. So people aren't willing to pay.
High barrier to entry, consolidation, and collusion. Look at how many airline mergers have happened over the past decades.
That wouldn't explain why the reverse happened. Everyone introduced the crappier economy tier; even the airlines initially saying they wouldn't eventually caved and now there's a crappy economy tier default. Moreover, gradually these crappy tiers converged, including some (united iirc) getting slightly less crappy following user demand.
Most people want cheaper tickets and don't shop on quality. In the rare cases that they do airlines readily adjust. But the airlines trying to offer quality as the default would go out of business
Price aggregators like Google Flights continue to show the crappy tier by default, which means that airlines have to offer that tier to appear competitive. No idea why Google wants to build its product this way, but there are only a few companies in this business.
One of the fundamental truths of American aviation is a significant fraction of fliers will buy the cheapest ticket every time. They’ll bitch about it. But if you cut some leg room and a few dollars off your tag, you’ll swing them from another.
Basic economy doesn’t exist because of Google Flights. It exists because it sells. Well enough that it sustained entire discount airline fleets until the majors copied their model.
Wouldn't it make sense for regulators to focus on those problems then, rather than on setting arbitrary industry-wide limits on what level of service consumers are allowed to buy?
Many airlines offer different fare classes. For a return ticket half way around the world, I can pay $1100 for Economy, $2800 for Premium Economy, $3900 for Business Class and $6900 for First Class.
It seems you have to charge a big, big premium to deliver a less crappy experience.
And even then, the experience is only better in some dimensions - your checked luggage receives the same handling no matter what ticket you buy.
Don't forget private charted jets. Those fill the >$7k hole for anyone willing to spend through the nose and they give the best experience of any flight.
The cost is around $1k/10k per flight hour.
That is the beauty of the floor, everyone stands on it so it becomes acceptable even if it shouldn't be.
Deregulation and disassembly of consumer protections is what Americans voted for.
Funny enough, different airlines play by different rules [1]
1. https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/airline-cancellat...
> Making flying even crappier doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Ah, but do you own an airline?
good summary on where air travel is headed: The Horrifying Evolution of Air Travel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnGgAyQhP7Q
> Making flying even crappier doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
It does, from a purely ecological point of view. What was the number again? 4 longhaul flights for life per person if we want to achieve sustainability?
I don't know much about running an airline. But whenever an industry lobbies to de-regulate itself, you know it will be bad for consumers.
The airline industry is a good example of an "open" market that is really anything but. It is effectively an state-supported oligopoly. Airlines have split up every major market, usually with very little competition amongst themselves, and then have a government bailout backstop if things go wrong (this include things like favorable bankruptcy laws that let them get out of wage commitments). This is without even getting into the unholy public-private airport situation.
The answer is actual competition with some reasonable passenger protections.
Let foreign carriers compete here (9th freedom rights). No bailouts for failed operations or even unusual circumstances like covid.
> The answer is actual competition with some reasonable passenger protections.
This is physically impossible. Airplanes require airports and airports only have so much space they can dedicate to flights.
An extreme example of this is the Ronald Reagan airport. How could you possibly get more competition there when it cannot grow and it's surrounded by the urban area?
That's like saying the solution to your water company monopoly is more competition. You can't bury more water lines for different companies. Someone has to own the existing lines.
Fiber optics is getting multiple providers in several markets, if not many. They do bury/lift multiple lines, even in more rural areas.
I think the biggest issue with airlines is they act as only an airline. The first company to realize they are a transportation company and can get you door to door will be great.
E.g. an airline that can seamlessly get you to/from the airport via a local premium/private transit line that can get you to your home or destination.
I think that's what you get with a first class ticket (never experienced it myself).
To be pedantic, I'm sure you "can", but the effort and political sway to do so for what may not even be profitable is humongous.
That was pretty much Google fiber in a nutshell last decade. They existing cable lines eventually pushed Google out of it.
>The answer is actual competition
It's hard to see how that can happen when politicians take money from the rent-seekers who benefit from the status quo. "Competition is for losers", says Peter Thiel, so buy yourself a state-sanctioned monopoly (like Palantir).
The bailouts for unusual circumstances are a really interesting case. The "unusual circumstances" tend to be perfect for industry consolidation, which is normally (and rightly) viewed with at least some skepticism, but tends to get a pass during unusual circumstances as a matter of survival. In no small part this is driven by the desire not to cause thousands of people to be laid off with no equivalent pay opportunities in sight.
The PPP program turned out to be a widely abused transfer of wealth from taxpayers to capitalists, yes. But I actually think in general that bailouts, especially for smaller industry players, are an important tool for preventing industry consolidation, which causes generational-scale harm that is difficult to reverse or even remediate.
I think what need to happen is that it should be much easier to pierce the corporate veil in cases of obvious negligence in planning that leads to being unprepared for a predictable event. And of course putting an end to PE-style "corporate raiding" behavior that really just amounts to embezzlement. Imagine an economy in which the owners, directors, and chief executives of corporation are, as individuals, required to uphold some level of fiduciary duty to their customers. The economy might look very different in that case.
Book trips from European websites in the future. Prices here need to include everything upfront. Which might lead to situations where you reserve a hotel room in the USA for 1500, but then only pay 1200 at checkout because the remaining 300 are the "resort fee" that will be paid at the hotel. Or take car rental: the cheaper, more complete packages for the USA are often booked in the EU at at better price.
+1 for hotels, but I'd be careful with car rentals. Often, these bookings are tied to the country of residence of the driver, which could at least theoretically have insurance implications.
> Prices here need to include everything upfront
How are you defining "everything" and "upfront"? Upfront as in the first page shown after searching?
Because many, many airlines/car rental sites have a complex muti-step process of different fares, extras etc until you get to the final stage
Can you give an example? I just checked a random rental website for France and I got a very clear `From $xx` price and I could — in one step — go to checkout with that exact price by simply not selecting any other options.
Sure you will have upsells but if a price for a service is presented, that should be a final price. You can't tack on "resort fees", the price presented must be inclusive of all the required charges. For example as much as I dislike Booking.com, the price they show for a room includes everything — tax, mandatory cleaning fee and city tax if applicable.
But it works that way too when I book in the US.
Which sites have you found with this feature in the US? Every one I have ever used adds various fees to whatever price shows on the listings.
Lol. No, VAT is never included in US.
https://www.kayak.com/cars/San-Jose,Costa-Rica-c30707/2025-1...
You can go to the last page and book rental. Only at the airport counter you will learn, there are extra fees you need to pay.
These two in particular :
> Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
> Transparency of Fees
How does a lawmaker justify this being in the publics interest ? I'm not even joking, I know "well lobbyist going to lobby", but this is a legitimate question. How does a regulatory body say "Yup, that's okay with us to remove" ?
Probably the thinking is: “The market will sort itself out. If a person doesn’t like this, they can pick an airline that has these features.”
Conveniently leaving out the thought that NONE of the other airlines will do this if it goes away.
Playing devil's advocate for a moment: I could imagine airlines wanting to not allow for a full refund if passengers can be booked on a "reasonably similar" connection. (I've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)
The problem here of course would be the definition of "reasonably similar". Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.
Okay, I can see some benefits to the airline that are not too egregious for point 1, maybe automatic can be updated to manual intervention. Not the worst.
But price transparency ?
> A4A opposes the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) rules requiring airlines to disclose ancillary fees upfront, arguing that these rules exceed the DOT’s authority and don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers.
> don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers
As a customer I like to know where my money is going and how much.
I don't follow the point. Suppose we live in a perfect world where exactly similar alternative flights are always available the moment yours gets cancelled. You still have to pay for it. And you do that by using the refund money.
Cancelling a flight without refunding it, just means profiting at the expense of the customer.
Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).
Deregulating this point just puts all the risk and burden with millions of individual customers, some of whom cannot easily carry the cost of unexpected events, and aren't professional parties that can and routinely do enter into properly-negotiated insurance products to mitigate their risk.
> 've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)
My understanding is that refunds eligibility starts at a >3 hour change, meaning an alternative timetable of 2 hours doesn't trigger an automatic refund right now. Further, even in the case of a significant change (>3h), the refund isn't automatic, it is only paid once the customer refuses an alternative booking or compensation. For international flights it's even 6 hours instead of 3.
> Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.
I do agree on this point, context really matters. And I think in theory it makes sense to offer price-differentation based on the context. i.e. if I am slow-travelling for 4 months, I'd be happy taking a 10% cheaper ticket (no-insurance), and have no recourse if there is an 8 hour delay.
Whereas earlier this month when travelling overseas for a wedding the day prior, I'd have paid a 10% extra fee to insure my travel time, to ensure I have recourse to travel with a limited (<2h) delay no matter what or be significantly compensated.
But that's still all theory, at some point differentiation on everything leads to complex and difficult decision making for customers. Fun in a Sim computer game, not so fun when booking a flight is a 20-step process with 200 pages of T&C that I have to assess against my personal situation.
> You still have to pay for it. And you do that by using the refund money.
You generally don't though? The airline will rebook you directly, even if the flight is on a different airline in my experience.
I'm mostly behind you with this, a great point that you make is the insurance.
> Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).
Those insurance companies have requirements for paying out, in Europe for example a low fare airline Ryanair will offer you a refund if your flight is delayed 2/3 hours. You can choose to still take the flight though which, for some is acceptable. But that refund is by way of a request, it's not automatically processed. It works, for me personally, but I've been delayed for important things where it was only an hour, I would have loved to have been able to get s refund to book on another airline but I have to say, I wouldn't "expect" that.. which is why I can soften on their first point.
Give me that choice (refund or rebook me) and let me choose. Problem is if the airlines don't have to give a refund I now no longer have a choice.
Airlines caused automatic refunds by systematically screwing customers for a decade, doing every single thing in their power to avoid giving any refunds. This policy exists because they proved to everyone they can't be trusted.
It will be some variation of the well-treaded argument of "us making more money just so happens to be in the public interest". Companies have become experts at arguing this in many different ways. You can see some examples in the article. More competition, purely hypothetically lower prices, etc.
Dream: 'This will lower prices for consumers by reducing administrative overhead and allowing for people to select what protections and plans they want for their trip.'
Reality: Tickets all cost exactly the same (because no company is going to willingly take less money) except now you get to pay more for less benefits.
Easy. "The public voted up and down the ballot for the platform that promised to gut regulations and consumer protection." Who is a single representative to deny the will of the people?
Are you not able to observe the current administration? There's no need to "justify" anything being in the public's interest.
The admin is no longer counting how many people cannot afford food for crying out loud.
The public voted against their interest.
I'd be curious to see how the all-in price of airline tickets has evolved in recent decades. It feels like it's now commonplace to have hundreds of dollars in additional fees for things like legroom. That means a cheap ticket is a midrange ticket and a midrange ticket can end up being quite expensive unless you fall for the "we get to strap you behind the bathroom with only the clothes on your back" Saver ticket.
It also means that you're often still out actual money if you use award miles.
Hundreds of dollars for legroom? Are you... sure? For what kind of flights?
One example: Chicago to New York on United, direct flight that is ~2.5 hours. $209 for economy and $381 for Economy Plus. This is a $172 difference.
And its even more for first class!
Sure, but everyone agrees that first class is full of perks. “People taller than 6’1 can sit here without being in pain” shouldn’t be a multi-hundred dollar up charge.
Maybe karma for short jokes?
Next up, $200 for head-room. You didn't think you could fly keeping your head upright for free, did you?
I'm most familiar with United. Economy Plus (which is mostly about a bit more legroom) does have a modest premium absent sufficient status that gets you it for free. But Premium Economy that gives you somewhat wider seats as well as legroom gets into the hundreds of dollars. International business has lots of benefits including legroom and lie flat seating but that usually gets into the thousands.
EP is just economy with slightly more leg room. PE is closer to business than EP. The food is upgraded along with the service. The seats are more recliner like and you generally have more room. Additionally, the PE seats are often the quickest to deplane if that's important. I can also work in PE seat, whereas EP not so much.
The problem with PE is that it's often not that great of a deal. Unless it's a super busy route, you can usually keep shopping for an upgrade and just go all the way to lay flat business. Side note, when going business class, understand that not all plane layouts and seats are the same. Check seat guru.
Source - I fly back and forth to the EU quite a bit.
Seatguru hasn't been updated in ages, use https://www.aerolopa.com instead
SG has failed me a lot lately. Thanks for the tip!
I agree with all that. The food still isn't great. And the seat still isn't great for a red-eye relative to business. I wouldn't generally work on a plane anyway. I've been in PE--don't remember the circumstances--but as I recall didn't think it was anything special for the cost.
Your final point is exactly it. PE is better, but the cost difference is generally too high above EP. At that point I tend to just go BC.
To your other points, at the end of the day, it's an airplane. And since I'm usually flying US airlines, even business class isn't that special outside of laying flat. I do fly back and forth to the EU enough though, that being able to work for 4ish hours is pretty useful.
>it's an airplane
Yeah. For me, $5K or whatever is still a decent amount and, even if you just put it in the vacation pile, that's a decent amount for meals and other experiences vs. being a bit more comfortable over a 10 hour (or whatever) flight.
My trick is that I always just buy the base economy ticket that can still be upgraded. Then I check for upgrades every couple days. What I found is that prices to move classes will vary wildly as they try to sell all the seats. It also makes it easier to upgrade a single leg - an overnight flight is more important to be lay flat than a daytime flight for example.
The other part of my equation is that I put a 'dollar figure x flight time' that I'm willing to pay to be more comfortable. If I see a price that hits my threshold I upgrade, otherwise not.
> At that point I tend to just go BC
It sounds to me like their pricing is working as intended and getting an even bigger upcharge.
Nothing should be allowed to be called "Premium Economy"
Premium doesn't have to mean "elite," it might also refer to a risk premium or any situation where a buyer has to pay extra. ;)
Eh, they already had economy plus. Premium economy is basically traditional domestic business class on widebody international flights that have lie-flat business (Polaris) seating as well. Honestly, putting it in the economy bucket in contrast to Polaris seems pretty honest in the scheme of things.
In a search just now, Delta Main r/t from ATL-LAX is $337. Delta Comfort on the same flight is $727. (Yes, it's more than 2x the price.) Obviously Comfort boards earlier, but it's not unreasonable to attribute most of the fare differential to the legroom.
Checked bags are also extra for either seat.
I've never understood why boarding early is considered a premium worth paying for (for normal flights with assigned seating). Planes are never as comfortable as whatever I have access to in the airport, whether that's hanging out in the lounge or sipping a drink at a restaurant, or just stretching my legs walking around the airport.
When I used to have carry-ons, boarding early ensured that I got room in the overhead bins to place the bag. I now use under-seater bags only and pack light so I no longer care when I get to my seat.
Then they gate check it which is a perk for me honestly. Now I don't have to schlep a bag anymore.
Yep. I've taken several flights in the past few months, and _every time_ by the time my boarding group was called, the staff announced that there was no more overhead bin space, and people would have to check bags.
Don’t forget they give you all the 10¢ bags of sun chips you can eat.
Recently I had received a mini packet of crisps that had four in it.
Four
How is that even worth the packaging cost
I'm 6'6" and I basically treat an exit row upgrade as non-negotiable. It's just a fundamental cost of long haul travel for me if I can't swing premium economy or business class.
To get some extra legroom, I paid (round trip, in CAD) $250 for a trip to Dublin this year and $320 for a trip to Hong Kong in 2023. That's a lot of money, but it was <50% of the cost to upgrade to premium economy and <20% of the cost to upgrade to business class.
This used to be much cheaper. I remember paying ~$100 for similar upgrades a decade ago, but airlines got wise to this at some point and jacked the prices way up.
Ah, for the days of old, when you could just ask nicely at the counter for exit row...
This isn't totally dead. I missed a flight last year and got bumped to a flight the next morning on some weird ticket class where I didn't get a seat assignment until the gate. The gate agent was able to give me a bulkhead seat with extra legroom at no cost. And this was with United, not some airline with a shining reputation for customer service.
So you can roll the dice and try to get a premium seat at the gate, but that's not a risk I'm usually willing to take.
US flights (99% of what I have experienced) definitely can get into three figures for anything other than "middle seat, way back". They know there's at least a built-in audience of taller people who will spring for legroom on any flight over an hour. And now that I am old and tall, an aisle seat and legroom are incredibly valuable to me (don't tell 'em, ok?).
Oddly there is no such premium for wide people. I understand (somewhat) price discriminating based on the quantity of space required by the passenger (for comfort or from physical necessity), but then why does this apply to one dimension and not the other.
I'm not even talking about pay-by-weight as was famously tried between pacific islands. Nobody wants to have someone spilling over the armrest into their seat, and I'm sure plenty of people who are wider than the seat would like to fit without going first class. I'm not even so unusually sized, but cannot sit in the aisle without being hit by every person and trolley passing by.
Most airlines require very wide people to buy an extra seat. The requirement is that they have to be able to lower the armrest.
There's rules for passengers and airlines... but enforcement is limited, because who wants to slow down boarding by checking.
And compliance is hard for passengers, because you have to call in to book the special case, and who wants to call in?
But theoretically, a passenger that will encroach on an adjacent seat can pay for the extra seat (I don't know if they need to also pay for seat assignment to get two seats next to each other), and then if the flight doesn't actually sell out, the extra seat fee is refundable. But when you actually board, people will see the 'empty' seat and try to sit in it, even though you paid for it. Etc.
Yes, as a 6' 2" person, I can assure you that a single leg of a flight will be less that $100 but round trip and multiple legs moves it to $200+ very easily.
The point of the comment is it’s hard to be sure because the pricing is anything but clear.
Related to that; I am curious in what airlines think they will get or what motivates them to prioritize being deceptive, sneaky, dishonest, manipulative, lying, con-artists, i.e., just abusive all around? If everyone is required to provide "all in pricing" then there is no competitive advantage in being a bigger, better fraud; so must it be concluded that they think they have a competitive advantage at being the better scheming, fraudulent, manipulative con artist?
The airline market is so constricted and basically well across the line of a cartel, but I guess they think they get something out of it or do they just like the getting one over on people? "ha, you thought you were going to have a good time with your family or see your grandmother's funeral for X price, but we squeezed another $200 out of you, Sucker! *board room high fives all around*"
Or maybe is it a kind of momentum of the people and organizational structure that was built up over many years, aimed at facilitating the con and fraud perpetrated on the public that still has power to manipulate the airline enterprises themselves? The people who used to do that are after all, as I assume adept and oriented towards being deceptive, manipulative, scheming.
It's all a bit odd to me and I would love if someone could spill the beans on what motivates the airlines on being so adamant about cheating, lying, abusing, scamming, conning and generally being really awful to people and society.
It’s really easy: it’s all about revenue maximization.
Honestly, people fly too much. I’m 6’5 with a 24” shoulder - flying economy is painful for me and the poor soul stuck next to me.
I don’t need to fly for business and am fortunate to have a lot of PTO. So, I fly first class, business class, or not at all. If the cost is too much, i drive. There’s virtually no east coast trip that is more unpleasant to me via car. I’m young enough that I can do NY to Georgia or Chicago overnight with no ill effect. There’s so much wasted time around the airport many flights don’t even save time.
I’m going on a trip to Asia in the early spring with my kid. I could save like $4000 flying in the back… but why? If that amount of money is breaking the bank, I cannot afford two weeks there anyway.
I regret to clarify here that you will definitely save time flying between NYC and Chicago. Would that it were otherwise! Toronto is arguable.
You won't save time, but, man, with the price of car rentals lately you will save a TON of money depending on how long you need to stay.
First principle is that customers will choose whoever has the cheapest flights in general, and airlines that try to market on having an inclusive price without surprise fees suffer anyway because the real cost is closer to fees.
The second is price discrimination - think current McDonald's prices. Soaking people who can afford it and letting people who are very frugal navigate your confusing system and membership etc is worth a good amount of money
I'll just amend to say that many on this forum are probably not super price-sensitive. But, within the broader population, many people are going to be more or less unconditionally looking to shave $100 off their family vacation. Which encourages a lot of a la carte nickel and diming over all-in charges.
Nope. A good airline is hard to find (as long as they aren't f@sc1st$)
Not entirely true with the cheapest = first. I've been using a reputed and magnanimous airline for years and it doesn't matter what the other low-blow contenders are offering.
As long as it's in my anticipated budget, I want comfort, consistency, and courage. These undercutters have me scared they shaved off a wing to save on price. @#$% them. I fly with my airline, and these jerkoffs who want to bend over for fascism can die with it.
Out of interest, which airline? I've never found a particularly good one in the us.
I absolutely love Delta. I’ll fly other airlines domestically occasionally. But I have found their customer service to be top notch and they have the best web interface/app.
The Behind the Bastards podcast episodes covering Frank Lorenzo might be right down your alley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bmGff5f-Ug
(They are available from all the usual podcast places, but it just happens that the youtube mirror is the easiest way I know to link a specific episode.)
To add to this - is there some kind of general rule for what specific industries will devolve into the pattern of having these sorts of anti-consumer practices? Off the top of my mind I can think of cable companies, gyms, cellphone providers, airlines, live events. Is it market capture and/or the high cost of switching providers that prevents meaningful competition?
I think the main motivation is simply that reduced transparency enables better price discrimination: As a company, you want every individual to pay as much as they are willing/capable. You explicitly don't want to sell the same service for the same price to everyone.
>board room high fives all around"
Things like bonuses tend to be driven by short term gains. Who gives a hell about a few years from now when you can get an extra $xxxxxxx in your paycheck now.
> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.
Asking families if their teenager could be seated separately is one thing, but knowing the airlines, they might as well start seating the toddlers in the overhead luggage compartments.
That was an option in the 1950s for infants. They attached a little cot to the overhead — sort of like the changing shelf on a pack and play!
Isn't this basically just putting the kid in a tumble drier whenever you hit turbulence? Did they pad the roof and door as well?
The turbulence is no worse being up high in the plane vs being down in a seat. In the 1950s, NONE of the passengers would have been using seatbelts...
“When an airplane crashes, the safety belt…may become a deadly hazard.”
- Scientific American Dec 1951 “The Dangerous Safety Belt”
"Aviation requirements for basic safety features, including passenger safety belts, were codified in 1972"
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-airlin...
Concussions hadn't been invented yet, that's why no one wore a helmet back then
You can still do this for infants on some long haul flights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8fphE1v66M&msockid=42557114...
The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.
Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
So then just pile them up without knocking them out.
Can you fit more people in horizontal than if they stood up and you had little straps to hang onto like a subway?
In theory yes because you can use the space at the top that would otherwise be above people's heads. No guarantee they get to their destination alive though.
You can just lay them ass-to-mouth and then stack them. Come on, the slave ships and Dutch East India company taught us that one.
Don't forget that some airlines seriously looked at standing "seats" for short hop flights.
Only a new airplane. Most planes are designed for a lot of air and couldn't fly with as many people as can physically fit inside. Cargo airplanes carefully watch this factor. As a passenger I've been on airplanes that took off with empty seats even though there were people on standby wanting to get on because with the weather they couldn't fly a full plane.
You and I should talk :) I've been thinking of this ever since seeing the movie "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone". He uses a sleeping gas on his audience packs them into a moving truck and "magically" transports his audience to a new location. Tada! Basically same idea, but substitute moving truck with jet.
That's still way too inefficient, it leaves so many gaps and barely tiles the space. As soon as we get our hands on full reconstruction, you can bet the airlines will require everyone to be ground into a slurry and pumped into the fuselage like a huge tank, and get reassembled at the destination.
The Fifth Element solution!
Imagine waking up on your 20 hour flight to Tokyo early...
The current rule only applies to children under 14 years of age. They don't have to ask for teenagers.
People think I'm crazy for saying this but the only thing stopping big corporations from hiring hitmen to just actually murder people to be more profitable is that it's illegal to do so. If it were legal for them to make you put your baby in overhead luggage you bet your ass they'd be doing it if it were profitable.
This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.
I usually filter out all Basic Economy fares from my search and only look at the next tier up, where you can get seat selection at time of booking. I just figure it's a product that doesn't work for my family.
I have to pay more to select the exact seats I want on a plane, so why shouldn't you?
Think of the inverse, someone who doesn’t care about where they sit save money.
On the other hand, I never understood this obsession with grown people acting like it’s the end of the world if they don’t sit together. My wife and I fly a lot together - over a dozen trips this year - and she flies more frequently by herself. We both prefer window seats. We hardly ever sit together unless we can get 2 seats next to us by ourselves like on larger planes with a 3-2-3 combination or exit row seats in main.
In this particular case, it lets the parents trade childcare responsibilities back and forth during the flight, which can be a serious boon on a long flight or if one of them starts feeling unwell.
I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to
I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers.
I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that.
All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.
This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.
Playing devil's advocate here, as a parent this sounds great! Have your young children sit next to a couple strangers a few rows away: now you get some peace and quiet while other people have to deal with their seat-kicking, drink-spilling, whining, crying, bathroom trips, diaper changes, requests for entertainment, etc.
You know this is going to happen too: there are going to be some subset of parents that are not going to pay extra and will just choose to let the airline make their kids some complete stranger's problem. Hope the general public enjoys it.
I have medical issues that require me to fly first class. It's not a choice. I don't expect you to pay for it
And? They are your kids. Why should someone who has paid to reserve their seat have to move because you were to cheap to pay to choose your seat.
Also see, I’m not going to work extra hours because a parent can’t work late. Just because I have grown children doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life outside of work.
Ah yes I love modern society "they're your kids" until every busybody on earth calls CPS or police at the first sign of doing something they disapprove (happened to me because I shit you not, my kid is a different race and that was 'suspicious' to be a kidnapping -- thanks FOIA for the bodycam revealing that bullshit).
Or when it comes time to tax the shit out of the grown kid made possible by the massive time and money investment made by the parents, the lion's share of the total. "No no no, that was society's investment -- now they owe us those taxes as part the social contract!"
When it comes time to do the gangster shit it's all on the parent, but when it comes time to reap the benefits suddenly "we're a society."
There is a huge difference between funding education, health care etc which I’m all for paying taxes for and subsidizing your flight.
And if you expect me to defend the police or Karyns about anything, let’s just say I grew up on NWA and “F%%% the police” and my mom constantly told me that don’t think because my White friends could get away with minor criminal mischief that I could.
Well actually she said “don’t let your little white friends get you in trouble”. But close enough.
If you want to deregulate airlines you have no complaint from me. I couldn't give a shit if there's anti-kid airline who's advertising message is "Fuck dem kids."
If you're talking about a private company choosing who to subsidize once government regulations are removed, then I don't see how you have room to complain. It's not like taxes. You can charter a flight or rent a cessna to pilot if you don't agree to the private terms of carriage of anyone offering tickets.
Taxes are way worse because a guy with a gun can show up and put anyone who disagrees with the majority's idea of charity or subsidy into a tiny cage; if you disagree you can't even escape it by leaving the country because the USA has worldwide taxation. I would classify private flight subsidization as a much more ethical, moral, and wildly less violent regime than taxing people for the healthcare of others.
I personally have no problem with the current state of affairs or with the state of affairs that the airlines are proposing. I fly Delta, I don’t buy the cheapest ticket so I can cancel a flight up to the time the flight is scheduled and get a credit.
From the little I do fly other airlines, only the cheapest fares don’t at least give you credits for cancelled flights.
Every airline has a credit card that gives you free luggage where the annual fee is cheaper than the baggage fee for a couple flying round trip.
My wife and I also have status with Delta (Platinum Medallion), lounge access, TSA PreCheck, Clear etc so we can do our best to not deal with families and once a year vacationers. We live in Orlando now.
But if I did have small kids. I would definitely pay for reserve seatings.
Haha, it's very true. Everyone is an individualist when it comes to paying for kids but when it comes to social security, we should raise that to high heaven so that the current kids will be slaves to the geriatric majority.
"I don't mind paying more money in taxes" they always say, knowing full well that the majority of the incidence is on the next generation.
Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with.
Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.
> must reserve
With the current implementation exposed to the end customer, yes, that's required. Reserving specific seats isn't fundamental to the constraint that some people want to sit together.
Plus, the current reservation system is predatory in its own right. When booking you're dumped into a page strongly suggesting you must choose a seat, and all available options cost more than the base ticket.
Well, any half decent operator will put you next to each other and the other half at least lets you select seats during the check-in process. If that 90% certainty is not enough for you... just reserve the seats. Yes, it'll cost money, because otherwise there won't be any seats to reserve as anyone will do it.
Easy solution, just charge more for a child than for an adult, no fees needed.
Currently children <11yr get a 20-50% discount/subsidy for a seat. So just rectify it to a 100% and give the seat as a bonus instead. Everyone happy?
I have never seen this. For all flights I have flown recently, the price for a kid and an adult is the exact same.
Honestly I would be happy if the 5x the price, and I'm a parent. I hate flying with a kid and it would let me convince the wife to drive or take a boat the next time.
I basically only fly with a kid because everyone else is willing to subsidize the massive externality I impose on them.
> All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit.
I don't understand this. When you book a flight, do you not chose your seats so you sit together? Why should it be up to the airline to ensure you get a seat with your baby, that is part of planning a trip.
When I rent "the cheapest car on offer", if it is a 2 seater, and I have 3 passengers, that's on me for not planning for my passengers.
People who chose to not pick their seats (to save the $25 or whatever) shouldn't then punish people like me who paid to sit in a specific seat with specific neighbors.
Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes.
My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly.
Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip.
The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.
Let it be the airlines problem. My screaming five year old is going to generate a bunch of complaints and refunds for the airline.
The kid will get over it, and the misery of the rest of the people on the flight isn’t my problem. The stewardess can deal with it and nobody gets their peanuts.
I'd rather it be solely a problem of their profits rather than adding inconvenience to families as well. Also, my kid is going to be a lot happier and less likely to be upset and bother everyone else if both of us are there to entertain her and keep each other from being frazzled.
There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything.
i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.
I can imagine! I'm just speaking of my kid in this current week. By next week she'll be offering us a completely different traveling experience
Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure.
I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight.
The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.”
They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.
they're flight attendants now
The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole.
Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
I'm fine subsidizing necessities for kids, but flying is a luxury
As I said elsewhere in the thread there are situations where it's not a luxury. A bigger point though is that it's an additional burden on parents for something childless people simply don't need to deal with. Childless people might want assigned seats, but they don't need to sit next to an infant. When a parent can't sit near their kid it negatively impacts everyone else on board the aircraft. It might result in the kid screaming more, but it'll also definitely require people to get up and shuffle around more frequently as parents come to change/feed/soothe their infants (car seats/bassinets are not supposed to be in aisle seats).
Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something.
Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs.
I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to.
> I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik
I don’t think it does. People with flexibility to be assigned to sit next to whomever and willingness to sit in middle seats ought to be able to pay less in exchange for providing that flexibility.
Their flexibility is lubricating the entire system and making it work better. Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?
What I see is people who aren’t offering that flexibility arguing that they should still get the price as if they were willing to provide it, when they are consuming rather than providing it.
> I don’t think it does.
Let me know if this is an unfair summarization, but the way I see it: my comments discussed how charging parents additional fees to sit near their infants is bad. Your comment proposed charging people who wanted assigned seating for that feature and allowing people who don't need that flexibility a discount. How does that address my point rather than simply re-describe the thing I've already described as the problem?
> Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?
Because that flexibility is needed more by parents and we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out. IMO we don't do nearly enough of this, like with family leave, daycare, or healthcare costs.
Because the framing of what is the standard or default matters in determining whether a problem needs solving at no cost or merely needs a solution to be available in the market.
If the standard is everyone can choose whom they sit next to (assuming seats are available), then parents are at no disadvantage. This is how air travel was for a very long time, when tickets were much more expensive and much more all-inclusive.
Now, people are seeking cheaper tickets, so the airlines propose to offer discounts for passengers to forgo some of that all-inclusive nature and if those forgone items are a good match for your needs, feel free to take advantage of them. If they're not, feel free to buy a ticket that meets your needs.
No one would think that when the USPS offers Next Day Express, Priority, and Parcel Post that a parent should get Next Day Express for the price of Priority or Parcel Post just because they're mailing something for their kid, right? When a rental car company charges a family of 6 more for a large car than a childless couple is charged for an economy car, are they violating some kind of social contract? "Use discount code BUTIHAVEFOURKIDS to rent a Suburban for the price of a Civic." A landlord charging more for a 2 BR than a 1 BR also hurts parents, but I assume most people think that's logical and proper.
> we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out
Some people want that. Not all people want that and probably no one wants it in unlimited amounts. I have kids and I'm largely indifferent on the topic beyond supporting strong K-12 public education. I do observe that some people take the notion of "we should spread out the costs of kids" way, way too far for what I think is rational.
Selfishly, I'd be perfectly fine if Basic airline tickets were made illegal for everyone. It just makes my looking at airfares online more annoying because I'll never buy a Basic fare. But, people who do find Basic fares to meet their needs ought to be allowed to have access to them, so I don't actually want them banned.
Do kids have to fly…???
Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.
What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.
Feel like grandma is more capable of traveling to see the kids with the newborn than the other way around
Newborns are often basically potatoes and relatively easy to travel with
You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.
imo people asking those questions have no empathy, or they are just dumb. :)
You don’t _want_ a sleep deprived new parent on-call. A sleep deprived person is not who you want responding to an emergency, so of course others should pick up the slack temporarily. That’s what being a TEAM is all about. Kind of like playing a sport?
Now if the team is tiny the on-call impact will be a much bigger deal, and i sympathize, but in that case i’d blame management for having poor redundancy / contingency plans, NOT my colleague.
And for some reason there’s always some snarky person who chimes in with a comment like “but they chose to become parents!” A tale as old as time… so did our own parents! They chose. But i’m a human being that has empathy and i’m grateful to those who helped pick up the slack during their stressful newborn phase.
He said had to, as in necessities. No one has to go on vacations, much less fly for them
Well then if the people without kids don't like it they can just not fly.
Or we can treat people equally and not discriminate based on whether or not they have kids
> Or we can treat people equally and not discriminate based on whether or not they have kids
Society has to treat parents differently because children are necessary for society to continue. If you make being a parent sufficiently burdensome, people will choose not to have them.
Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do. Delta said in an earnings call for instance that less than 5% choose basic economy where you can’t choose your seat.
> Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do.
It's an additional expense which isn't a luxury for parents. You can't sit far from an infant for 6+ hours because they need close attention. Also, sometimes there aren't adjacent seats for you to choose. Nevertheless, gate agents are usually able to somehow make things work. I'm not sure how they do this on a packed flight though. I didn't notice anyone being called over the PA after a gate agent moved all three of our seats to a different row on our last packed flight.
Flying is a luxury. It’s one thing to pay taxes to fund the school system, pre-K, health care, even state college. I’m all for that. But if you want to fly as a parent either suck it up and pay or don’t fly. There are parents who take long road trips because they can’t afford to fly.
But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.
My wife and I have chosen a different flight because the seats we wanted wasn’t available.
Of course all of these opinions of mine go out of the window if it truly is an emergency. But even then, at least with Delta, they only allocate a certain number of seats as “basic economy” and once those are sold out - like they might be on a last minute flight - you have to pay a fare where you choose your seat.
> Flying is a luxury.
You appear to have since edited your comment, but the version I replied to referred to being able to choose a seat as the luxury, not flying itself. As I've said elsewhere, flying is either a straight up necessity in some cases and a practical one in others. As I've also said in other places, people without kids can fly without need of choosing their seats.
> But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.
You can debate on whether or not flying is a necessity, but if we're flying then it's a luxury for you to sit next to your wife but it's a necessity for me to sit next to my infant.
It’s a distinction without a difference. Just like flying is a luxury. I paid to sit next to my wife. You can pay to sit next to your infant. Don’t inconvenience me because you want to save a couple of hundred dollars.
You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.
> It’s a distinction without a difference.
That difference matters quite a bit if you're specifically arguing about how people who are going to fly get to experience said flight.
[Edit] If you don't believe that parents have as much reason to fly as anyone else I don't think there's much point to further discussion. However if you do believe it then whether or not assigned seating specifically counts as a luxury matters quite a bit.
> You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.
Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids? That's a very good way to make having kids prohibitively expensive and part of how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'm in my late 30s and most of my friends chose not to have kids. For quite a few of those friends, they decided not to have them specifically because of how expensive it's become. You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
I didn’t say parents shouldn’t fly. I said if you want to be able to select yoir seat, pay just likf other people do.
> Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids?
So i now live 10 miles away from DisneyWorld, should my ticket prices also be more so your kids can get in free when we only have to pay for two adults? We were also able to downsize to a 1200 foot condo from a 3100 square foot house, we can spend our money on vacations instead of travel hockey like my friend.
What next? Should airlines have “kids fly free”?
> You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
I’m all for both low skill and high skill immigrants coming in where there is actually a shortage.
But play me the smallest fiddle because you don’t think you should have to pay for a ticket to reserve your seat requiring other people to move. See also, if you are too big to fit in one seat without encroaching on my space, you should also have to buy two seats - a policy many of the airlines have.
Yes, just like other people need to. Families move. Families are spread out. Families go on vacation.
We traveled so my only remaining grandparent could meet her great granddaughter before she dies, which could be any day now. Do you think we should make doing that harder just for slightly higher profits?
Hmmm didn't realize families had to go on vacation, and even more so they had to do it by flying
I didn't do these things for economic reasons growing up, and I'm perfectly fine today
You're free to argue people shouldn't expect to be able to go on vacation once in a while or see family. However, not only do I think that's absurd but it doesn't address my other examples.
They don't have to go to Grandma's funeral I guess. However they will fly if they are going to make it on time. (This is a real situation for me a few years ago)
No one does, so what's your point?
A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
They are meaningfully different scenarios, though.
If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained.
If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child.
I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.
At which point a homo sapiens specimen becomes a homo economicus?
What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.
What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience.
What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human.
And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.
> What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.
And charging parents paying extra so families can sit together is just an easy target.
They don’t charge “parents extra”. They charge everyone extra for choosing a seat.
There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you.
Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use.
If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.
Okay, in that case the airlines shouldn’t allow people to book a fare where you can’t choose your seat if you are flying with a kid - problem solved.
Right, that's my third paragraph.
I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to
Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.
It drives me crazy that airlines are allowed to book tickets for families who have to sit together ... but then they have to sort it out at the gate.
It's just a big pain for everyone.
Original title did not fit on HN so I had to edit it, origional:
>American Joins Delta, Southwest, United and Other US Airlines Push to Strip Away Travelers’ Rights and Add More Fees by Rolling Back Key Protections in New Deregulation Move
Deregulation once again helping business at the expense of consumers.
Look at what flying cost before deregulation and then decide if you want to go back.
I was hoping that the pendulum would swing the other way with the scandal over too many passengers bringing out their bags on a recent AA evacuation caused by a burning tire. The push to eliminate checked bags has created a chaotic cabin environment that probably exacerbated the situation. There's no sign of it getting better either. The overcrowding of overhead bins creates a prisoners dilemma where flight attendants pressure passengers to put smaller bags under their seats, disincentivizing bringing anything but a big roller bag.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l2n-di3hJE
As someone who has traveled for a long time, I find two things to be true:
1. People like business travelers or those with even minimal levels of status/benefits (who don't pay for checked luggage) don't usually preferentially check bags because luggage gets delayed, it's harder to switch flights when there's a weather etc. problem, and they have to wait at the luggage carousel.
2. Hard and hard-ish roll-aboards are a menace. Especially in a world of generally more casual dress, soft-side luggage would make overheads a lot more manageable--understanding that some people really can't use shoulder bags or backpacks.
I agree with both these points, though I'm much more willing to check a bag when traveling on vacation than when traveling on business. If I were to lose a bag on vacation there wouldn't be the same consequences.
On vacation I don't have my work laptop, so it's easier to toss toiletries and an emergency change of clothes in a small under-seat carry-on bag. Besides, tourists aren't expected to smell nice and look put-together, and are more likely to have a flexible schedule that would let them go shopping if the bag doesn't turn up.
Only once has the airline lost my bag while on vacation. It was only slightly annoying and they found the bag and got it to me eventually. I've seen a coworker whose bag was lost on a business trip to India. He was stuck wearing the same clothes - a tshirt and jeans - for multiple days. This included time in the office (which had a dress code) and at least one business dinner.
>If I were to lose a bag on vacation there wouldn't be the same consequences.
Not that taking everything carryon was really an option in this case, but I had a bag misplaced after a connecting flight was canceled. This was a group hiking trip but I had at least an extra day scheduled. Still spent about $500 to minimally restock although my bag arrived at literally the last minute before one of the guides left the hotel for our one-way walk.
For me it's not having to wait at the carousel at the end, it's having to wait in that enormous line at the beginning. I really don't understand why they make it so much work just to drop off your checked bag before the flight.
Many European (and other) airports now have self-done baggage drop-off.
At Copenhagen Airport, I usually get off the metro, walk to the luggage tag machines at the end of the platform and scan my passport (or boarding pass). That prints a bag tag (and boarding pass if requested), so after sticking that to my luggage I drop it off at the counter — I put the bag on the scale/conveyor, it scans the barcode, prompts me to press "Confirm" that there's no explosives etc, and I'm done.
I scan my boarding pass to go through the barrier into the security screening, walk to the gate, and very often scan the boarding pass again to get onto the jetbridge.
I can easily go from the metro to the plane without interacting with anyone. I understand this is Scandinavian bliss.
(Exceptions are trips to countries where I need my documents to be checked; e.g. to go to the USA a checkin agent has to see my ESTA visa waiver. Oddly, going somewhere like China which requires a printed visa in my passport does work on the machine, as the machine prompts me to scan it.)
Wait, you go through security without interacting with anyone? How does that work? Other than that though, this really sounds pretty much the same as my experience in US airports in the last decade.
I missed that — yes, sometimes someone says "anything in your pockets?" or similar, and someone else beckons me to walk through the metal detector. If I'm 'randomly' checked of course I have to speak.
I found American airports less hands-off (especially security, which is considerably more hands-on than I'm used to, "Sir, I will now rub your balls"). But then I'm almost always flying internationally out of the USA, so it's not a fair comparison against domestic (Schengen) flights in Europe.
My experience with United over the past few years is that there's a pretty quick pre-registered drop line. But that doesn't apply everywhere presumably. I rarely check bags but for some types of trips (generally hiking trips for me) it's sort of unavoidable.
My wife and I are both Delta Platinum and it’s half and half. Since we always get upgraded to C+ with dedicated overhead and we board early, for non stop flights, we won’t check our bags for short getaways.
We hate lugging luggage around the airport for layovers and now that we don’t live in ATL any more, we almost always have layovers.
I don't want to check my luggage, I had them damaged or lost more than once.
Plus all the additional time wasted in planing/deplaning the cabin in general as you wait for 90%+ of passengers in rows ahead of you to grab roller bags from overhead bins. Including the time wasting bottlenecks of "overhead bins full, everyone else must now gate check" guaranteed to slow the last passengers from planing and then on deplaning the crowds stuck in the jet bridge waiting for gate checked bags.
(Then there's the factor of how much time and space all that also wastes at security checkpoints.)
Checked baggage has the efficiencies of forklifts and trucks and conveyor belts. Just as airlines fixed most of the problems with those systems and got them to be efficient beasts they decided to disincentivize actually using them by charging extra for what is the cheaper cargo space. I wish an airline would have the courage to reverse the fees structure and charge for overhead bin space instead. (But then I also travel with IBS issues and my patience in deplaning has been severely tested enough that I know not everyone shares quite my annoyance at deplaning issues in particular.)
I have never had a gate checked bag where you don’t pick up your bag at baggage claim except for regional flights on small planes where even standard carry ons won’t fit in the overhead.
And for the pedantic really small planes like Sansa in Costs Rica for their 30 minute flights between San Jose and other cities.
I've seen everything from gate-checks on the carousel to a special pickup counter to leaving the bag on the tarmac covered in ice, with standard commercial airframes. It depends on airline policy and available airport infrastructure.
Yeah, it gets worse than that, too, because some airlines have multiple types of gate checks. Delta, which I've flown the most on recently, lets you gate check at the gate desk up until like 10 minutes before boarding and those get tagged like normal checked baggage, sent to a baggage car for the normal forklift-ability, and will show up at baggage claim at your final destination, but Delta also lets you gate check at the last minute by dropping it at the end of the jet bridge and those get a slightly different tag, are basically thrown into cargo by hand, and also need to be pulled out of cargo by hand and so are thrown right back onto the jet bridge on the deplaning side of the next destination, not the final one. In the case of "overhead bins full" every bag after that full point gets into that second category of jet bridge bags. (And yeah, I've seen that particular case cause some traffic jams in deplaning.)
(Delta also has a third type of "gate check" if you count the regular checkin desk silliness to try to skip bag fees by checking in with 0 bags, getting asked if you want to gate check, and then checking it at the checkin desk like checked baggage is supposed to work. That also goes to your final destination, but it's a silly process of "no I don't want to check bags" to say that "yes, I have one bag I would like to check but it's not worth your silly fees to check if you want to charge me".)
I also have met people that like the "jet bridge checked baggage" and think it a feature, not a bug. I understand there is a flexibility it offers if a connection fails or is too delayed or what have you, but the slow, artisanally hand tossed baggage part of that seems so inefficient and slow down to the rest of us, it is hard for me to not see that as a bit selfish and something that should have fees to pay for the extra labor and time involved. Also, if anything it seems a reminder that Baggage Claim got put on the wrong side of Security checkpoints in the US out of a mistake from historic airport layouts, and if you were to design the system from scratch you'd put it before leaving Security and allow people the option to choose which destinations it needs to be picked up (but still defaulting to the final one), and maybe a "recheck" desk right next to it.
And thats why i brought up Sansa. I flew into here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport#/m...
https://www.vacationscostarica.com/_next/image/?url=https%3A...
But that has more to do with the realities of the plane and the airport infrastructure like you said. It’s not about airline policy with regards to checked bags vs non checked bags.
On that plane, they not only weigh your bags, they weigh the passenger to make sure the plane isn’t over the weight limit.
I was just on a flight with an Asia based airline where even the most basic fare had 2 free checked bags and some pretty limiting carry on restrictions. It was amazing how much smoother boarding was because most people only had a backpack.
i wonder if they could create a central locking mechanism where if a plane makes an emergency landing, it automatically locks all the overhead bins so passengers don't waste time trying to pick their baggage out. the only remaining thing would be smaller bags underneath the seats which i don't tihnk would delay anyone or at least not significantly as the overhead bins.
> Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered.
This is wild. Are they really asking to be able to take money for a flight, then cacel it and keep the money? That's crazy.
In practice, they're not likely to just refuse any kind of recompense. More likely:
* Giving a credit instead of a refund.
* Offer a take-it-or-leave-it alternative flight.
* Only giving out credit/refund on request (so people that don't realize or do it in time loose their money).
a credit instead of a refund is almost the same thing as not offering a refund. you're going to have a hard time using that refund in a manner that benefits you (not taking a flight for no reason)
Yep. I don't fly a ton, but I had a flight canceled by Alaska a couple of years ago. They refunded me so I wasn't actually out anything, but they also gave me a $100 credit in addition to the refund. I really tried, but since I don't live in Seattle and don't fly much, there was no way I could use that $100 credit without paying a whole lot of my own money too. It annoyed me to "throw away money", but the credit expired unused.
I don't think that is going to happen. Before this new-ish regulation, the airline had discretion over how to rebook you or compensate you. Now if the delay is over 3h (iirc) they have to refund you.
I think even an arbitration court would have them reimburse you if they simply canceled a flight and kept your money.
Yes, But no one wants to have to go to court or arbitration to get a refund on a service that the service provider cancelled.
If AA cancels my flight, I want my money back without having to ask for it. I don't want to have to submit an application to receive AA credits that expire in 6 months, and then have to initiate legal action to get my actual cash back. Or having them say that they rebooked me on a flight three days later so they are off the hook.
The current rules make it so that the customer has the power. I can still give AA the option of rebooking me or refunding me, but it is MY choice.
I agree with you on everything except ever flying American Airlines. I think most people would agree with you.
And what percentage of people will take them to court just to get them to refund their ticket?
Airlines have full time lawyers with nothing to do but push paper around.
Why are we making it harder for the consumer to resolve an issue when the flight is clearly cancelled?
They just want to force you into weird store-credit style refunds so that you cannot go to a competitor or choose not to travel.
> And what percentage of people will take them to court just to get them to refund their ticket?
If there is any upside to mandatory binding final arbitration, it's that proceedings are cheaper and quicker. It might be that the arbitrators decide to universally rule in favor of the airlines amidst unambiguous evidence that the airlines took money and canceled the service, but seems unlikely.
It's also a huge risk on the part of the airlines to decide that their official policy is to stiff customers and hope it works out in arbitration.
> Why are we making it harder for the consumer to resolve an issue when the flight is clearly cancelled?
Because we elected the guy who said he would, going so far as to ensure he had a majority in both houses of Congress.
> They just want to force you into weird store-credit style refunds so that you cannot go to a competitor or choose not to travel.
Lol yes that is exactly it. I wouldn't have written that stuff above if I knew you were going to correct yourself.
My worry is that this incentivizes airlines to overlook safety concerns because grounding a risky flight or taking extra time to deal with unscheduled maintenance downtime will cost them money. It's a guaranteed certainty that some people will die because of it. I'd rather risk 300 bucks than my life.
Airline travel is safer than it has ever been in its entire history. What is your evidence for this hypothesis?
My evidence is the extensive history of corporations prioritizing profits over safety. The relative safety of air travel is not in dispute nor is it relevant to my point. If you give companies the option to choose they will always optimize for profits over safety.
The purpose is economic extraction of the customer base. They really are asking, because they can, and that aligns with this administration's low regulation and anti consumer stance.
Edit: Comment of comment value removed. Updated to increase value. Thanks indoordin0saur, I am occasionally in the wrong gear until the psychotropics kick in.
If you know it's a low value post then don't post it.
Why not celebrate the acceleration achieved by deregulation instead?
Airlines are basically as stupid and greedy as telcos. If it were up to them, GA aircraft, UAVs, model aircraft and basically anything that wasn't military or an airliner would be banned. It has strong analogs in telcos swallowing up large amounts of spectrum "cause muh 5 gee" and just squatting on it. I'm sure safety would be in the shitter too if the FAA was less watchful (not to say it's sufficiently aggressive on the big players today).
Every one of their pilots learned to fly in a GA or military aircraft, with the vast majority being GA.
I mean, why even bother to run flights at all in this scenario?
They could cancel 80% of flights and keep the rest to pretend they are still an airline.
Cancelations would be more profitable than the flights themselves.
80% would be way too much, the consumers would catch on and probably not buy tickets anymore. But don't worry, the airlines' best MBAs will be hard at work calculating the exact percentage of flights they have to fly before it starts hurting the bottom line. And once all airlines start doing it, they could bring that percentage down - what are the consumers gonna do if that's the only way to get to the destination?
Exactly. These supposed benefits of deregulated markets dissolve when the sellers have pricing power.
They still have to offer replacement flights, and if the replacement flight isn't reasonable they have to refund. They can't just keep your money.
Don't forget that a lot of flights are business flights. Fortune 500 companies will negotiate deals with the airlines, and they will ensure that getting there matters. Sure the CEO flys the company jet, but the next level down rarely does, but they talk to the CEO and will ensure that the chosen airline will get their people there by contract (wherever there is), if the airlines start failing to get people there on time these contracts will change since the large companies have enough money to matter. Those who fly a lot (again likely for business, even small businesses sometimes have someone flying several times a week) again are people the airlines need to make happy as they will go to different airline if there are problems.
Which is to say they can screw the "common man" who rarely flies, but most of the business is people who have enough power to to to airlines that treat them well and at that point it normally isn't worth screwing anyone.
I imagine the class action lawsuits at that point would bankrupt them
Presumably pre-emptively nullified by that arbitration agreement when you accepted the T&C to purchase the ticket.
Arbitration is not automatically in their favor. It is cheaper by far than a trial (in most cases), but they need to be at least somewhat fair or the whole thing collapses next time the government changes.
Class actions lawsuits only work if the courts and legislators have an interest in consumer protection.
>This is wild.
Keep in mind this rule has only been in affect for a little over a year. Airlines weren't being "wild" last year before the change.
They were being pretty annoying, which is why the regulation went into place. The "wildness" is that they're openly trying to make it annoying again.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
Does this mean when the passenger cancels or when the airline cancels? If it’s when the passenger chooses to cancel, this seems fine and fair: he paid for a flight; he chose not to take it. If it’s the latter, then it seems very unfair.
> Transparency of Fees
This seems patently unfair. Folks should know what they’re going to be paying ahead of time.
> Family Seating Guarantees
On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege. It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it. OTOH, families are a net benefit to society, so maybe it’s right for everyone else to pitch in a bit. Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
> [Elimination of] Accessibility Protections for Disabled Passengers
I wonder what that actually means. It could be fair (for example, folks too large for one seat purchasing two) or unfair.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege.
Agreed. I think they leave too much money on the table. Use of window shades and lavatories could be behind a subscription service as well, with Sky Comfort+ affording you the privilege of multiple lavatory visits for those who have chosen the luxury IBS lifestyle. I'll let you know if I think of anything else those pesky airline passengers take for granted.
Agreed. There should be a fee for speaking too. Some passengers are really chatty. In today's world where free speech is already being curbed, Airlines should charge a free-speech fee for passengers who plan to converse.
Separately there should be a fee for opening/closing the AC vent and using the overhead lights.
Are you a consultant for ryanair? If not, you should apply.
They tried to straight up remove the window shades, but that’s currently required by Ireland so no dice. A toilet charge has been floated but is apparently difficult both legally and technically. However given Ryanair’s usual treatment of passengers with disabilities I have no doubt a passenger with IBS would have an experience.
Ryanair talks a lot, but they mostly do it for the free PR they inevitably get when people act shocked. Almost all of their proposal are unfeasible or downright illegal and all of them should be considered bullshit until proven otherwise.
I think paying for water is a great opportunity. Maybe even the precious Biscoff. Especially for those cross country flights.
When I was young there was a discount airline named People Express that actually operated like this. In retrospect I imagine a lot of their nickel & diming would be considered standard these days, but back then it was revolutionary in both good & bad ways.
You’re way late to that party, Ryanair used to charge crew for water.
The forward thinking market leaders we deserve
Spirit Airlines does not give free water. They will give you a cup of ice if you ask.
What about seats? You can fly standing perfectly fine. Sitting is a privilege (definitely ryanair does not propose this form time to time).
> On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together [with your family], pay for that privilege
This seems shortsighted. Airlines could get much more money if they added a fee to guarantee not to be seated beside a kid!
If ya made it through all three of the sentences they wrote, you'd see the comment you replied to came around to it being reasonable to give families a break on group seating.
I did, in fact, manage to read all three. I just couldn't help but run with the devil's advocate premise.
I'm waiting for airlines to offer a budget First Class called Number Two Class. You get exclusive use the lavatory for the entirety of the flight.
You may not remember the coin-operated public toilets that used to be fairly common, especially in places like airports.
$99 recline your seat fee
I'd pay $99 so that the person in front of me *can't* recline their seat
Perfect, digital bidding app on each seat so you and the person in front of you can see who will pay more for reclining control.
Just know that when this inevitably happens, it’s now on you for putting it out into the universe.
I prefer when they recline as that always seems to give me extra knee room which is the main place that I am most cramped. When they recline the part of the chair where my knees are slides forward about in inch or 2.
You get that for free on some Ryanair planes.
One of the few nice things about flying with them.
I'd pay $99.01 so I can recline again... oh wait, I see where this is going...
Why not? Let’s also reverse the auction, make a C2B market:
I’d offer $300 roundtrip to Lahaina for 5-10 days, airlines? Any takers?
I'd pay $99 to sit across the aisle from you two and giggle.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege
This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another. It's seems like Mafia-tactic to seat people apart from another unless they pony up another $500 in upgrades.
I refuse to fly with United. I understand that there may not be 10 adjacent seats when flying with a big group, but spreading out a family on purpose just so you are more likely to buy an upgrade is evil.
I understand paying for checked luggage because luggage handling costs money. But purposely making the experience worse just so you can charge money for upgrades is evil.
> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another. It's seems like Mafia-tactic to seat people apart from another unless they pony up another $500 in upgrades.
The idea is that an airplane needs a certain revenue to run. Suppose it's 10k, and there are 100 passengers. Each passenger thereby pays $100.
However, some passengers (A) wish to sit in a big seat and are willing to pay for it, and others (B) don't care about seat size and are willing to give-up space for a cheaper ticket.
As such, 1 Passenger A may want to pay $250 instead to get a 30% bigger seat, while 3 passengers B give up 10% of their seat size and pay a $50 ticket. The airplane still collects $400 from 4 passengers as before, but the passengers are happier now. They have traded their individual desires, for something less valuable. A desired a bigger seat and thought $150 extra was less valuable than this bigger seat. B desired a $50 cheaper ticket and thought the smaller seat was less valuable. They traded and became happier.
You may say but nah, airlines will simply charge for bigger seats and keep the smaller seats the same price. But they don't, because they must compete with other airlines that don't. If they could do this they would've already.
For seat picking it's the same thing. A prefers to pay to sit close to a friend or partner. B doesn't care and prefers a cheaper ticket. Thus A pays a bit more, B pays a bit less.
I've always had to pay for seating as long as I can remember, I never cared enough (except long international flights), so I enjoy slightly cheaper prices than a world where there was no choice. It's not as evil as it may seem at first glance.
Checked luggage charges are mostly about price discrimination and not cost savings.
They also free up the cargo hold so they can transport mail. Speaking of which, did you know the TSA screening area is a farce?
I’ve always wondered if it would be cheaper to just have everyone check their bags and eliminate the overhead bin. I wouldn’t be surprised if airline boarding was sped up by 2-3x this way.
As a person who regularly flies international with just a carry-on bag, I very much prefer to get out of the airport with my bag in 20 minutes after I leave the plane vs waiting who knows how long for it to arrive and hope that somebody didn't break it/into it.
Newer planes/retrofitted ones with larger overhead bins with space for everybody are the solution.
A lot of airlines have started doing this by "gate checking" bags.
Flying with an infant, I'm very happy I can bring a diaper bag and other essentials on board.
OTOH it would overwhelm baggage reclaim and everyone will get stuck there instead.
that's a problem for the airport. Faster turnaround for the airline though!
nope. airport gets overwhelmed, aircraft get stuck because of processing, airline costs rise, ticket prices rise.
it's a single pipeline. every single one bottleneck has to be removed.
let's start with TSA.
I've heard that the boarding process itself is rarely the limiting factor in flights. They're usually waiting on other plane-related things (refueling? Pre-flight checks? I can't recall the details).
If it were, they probably wouldn't be doing their 8-group boarding process that takes 20 minutes just to let people start boarding, because gate-time is expensive for them.
> Speaking of which, did you know the TSA screening area is a farce?
My man, the TSA is a jobs program disguised as security theater. It's also a funnel for money into contractors' pockets (see: Leidos).
The current situation is the worst possible. They cost tax money, they raise ticket prices, and they make air travel worse for no benefit. If minimizing the jobs program is impossible, make them sit in a back room somewhere they can't cause backups and ruin proposals.
What do you mean there is no cost? Aisle and window seats are more valuable and can be sold for more, and this would force airlines to sell them to families without any up charge they would've received from other customers
I have no issue with airlines offering reserved seats for money. Let people buy their aisle seats and window seats and exit rows.
Most people don't give a shit where they sit, so most seats are not reserved. Traditionally, airlines tried to just put people close together when they booked together. When we check in, we just get random seats that are close together. That's okay. I'm fine with taking whatever seats no-one else wants.
If I understand United marketing correctly, they will actively sit you apart from others in your group unless you buy an upgrade. That is, instead of assigning you some of the free spots close together, you get put as far apart as possible, and they hope that you will buy an upgrade to sit close together.
Other airlines don't do that.
Is this a per-market thing?I’m from Chicago and therefore fly United with my family all the time. The website/app lets me pick all our seats at booking time in Economy class without any up charges.
It's a benefit of "Economy" vs "Basic Economy". I saw it on an international flight. You pay 20% more and are allowed to sit with your family. At least that's how I understood their marketing. There also seem to be some exceptions for kids under 12, but I'm not sure how they work.
I don’t have any data to back this up, but I think window and aisle seats being more valuable doesn’t necessarily mean they can be sold for more.
I am very tall and I always pay for a seat with extra legroom in economy. Whenever I’m picking my seat early, almost every seat in economy is available. People could pay to reserve a window or aisle seat, but anecdotally it seems like almost no one does this. Everyone I know just tries to check in as early as possible so they can grab a good seat before they’re all taken.
I don’t think airlines are actually losing any money by seating families together. It’s not like all those window and aisle seats would have been paid for otherwise.
An aside or window seat next to an unaccompanied toddler is worth considerably less.
If you're sitting together, that means at least one person is in the less-desirable middle seat, right?
As a parent who once flew with a baby with an ear infection, I'll admit there were times I desperately wanted to be seated apart from her.
Some seats are worth more than others (aisle/window vs middle). Putting families together means giving “preferred seats” away for no premium.
> > If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege
> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another.
Bin-packing is tough (look at Kubernetes!). Economically, giving folks willing to sit in a random seat an extra $10 and charging folks who want to sit together $10 is a wash.
Evil is, you know, torture and genocide, not efficient allocation of limited space.
Evil can be small and banal. Intentionally creating a negative outcome (algorithmically distance families) and charging people to escape it (preferred seating fees) certainly rhymes with a protection racket. It's purely the bad kind of capitalism, where instead of charging people for value you've created, you create new problems that only you can be paid to solve.
Can you elaborate on the Kubernetes bit
I'm not GP, but I imagine it has to do with efficiently scheduling pods onto nodes to optimally support workloads, some of which have a resource affinity (CPU, MEM, Disk) that can only be supported by particular nodes. In this analogy the affinity would be a strong preference for isle and window seats or sitting with family. It's easier to have the pods sort themselves according to preference than to write a daemon to do it.
> It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it.
I'd rather pay a monetary tax on my ticket to keep families organized together instead of the discomfort tax of sharing a row with parent+child that has been unexpectedly split up from their partner and is now trying to manage the child's behavior for the duration of the flight without the benefit of teamwork.
They don’t guarantee both parents are with the kid. They only guarantee that at least one parent is next to each (very young) child.
This presumably would mean you’d be feeding a random kid a bottle on long flights. God knows how they’d accommodate breastfeeding.
You are suddenly shaken awake from your restless, fractured sleep. A woman with a look of bright concern implores "Sir your son is watching porn!" "Huh?" She gestures to your right towards the 11 year old boy seated there. "That's not my son"
Remember, children as young as five can fly with out a parent/guardian (in the US, per AA website). So that could happen without change to regulations.
The crew is aware of all the unaccompanied minors on a flight.
Is that a meaningful distinction, though? "Aware of" != "Actively supervising". I guess it's easier to page a flight attendant than find a parent seated elsewhere, but neither can provide active supervision.
Agreed. Flying with my own kids, I'm constantly helping them. They struggle with headphones, opening food, fastening seat belts, being reminded to use the bathroom. Worse: they spill food, have potty training accidents, kick seats, yell, cry, and get scared. It gets easier as they get older, thankfully.
With an infant, having two caregivers within reach is huge. When flying with infant in arms there's nowhere to put the kid down, you don't have a free hand. An extra set of hands to wipe up spit-up, help adjust clothing for breastfeeding, collect the diaper bag, etc is a huge help.
The idea that parents need to pay more to help their children is cruel. I would expect people seated next to a child to end up swapping, to help the parent and to escape the noisy child. But that slows down boarding as people shuffle seats and adds anxiety that we're perfectly able to resolve.
Family seating guarantees are pretty crucial.
Many airlines have punitive seating algorithms (looking at you, Alaska), or pull crap like moving your seats around and separating you after you select them unless you have status (United used to, at least, since they had a practice of selling non-existing flights, then bin packing planes the day before) so without this you can end up having a breast feeding infant sitting across the plane from its family.
In essentially all cases, the kid can be put next to the parent without splitting up another parrty.
A breast feeding infant doesn't require a seat. Children under 2 can sit on a parent's lap.
Consider twins. My understanding is that a parent may only have one infant in their arms, the other infant needs a seat.
Nevertheless, a parent may choose to book a seat for their infant to give themselves extra space. If the airline puts that seat in a different row, it defeats the purpose.
They may also book a seat so they can use a carseat, which they may be traveling with anwyay, and also because it's safer for the kid to be belted in, and most small kids are used to them and they will fall asleep in them.
If you're travelling with young children being seated together isn't a luxury, so it's basically a tax on travelling with children, and a fairly expensive one ($100 easily for a return flight perhaps for four seats?) when you've paid it for all the seats for your family.
Though when we had young children, we seriously considered not paying and enjoying having somebody else looking after our four or five year old for the flight :-)
Given it is a necessity, I feel it should either be a compulsory extra cost if you have children below a certain age or it should (ideally) be free to be seated together, so that people who do pay for particular seats know that there won't be an unsupervised child allocated to the seat next to them.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
Airline cancellations. Seeing as they're talking about making a change, I assume it's airline cancellations, since no airline will currently refund you for a passenger cancellation.
Southwest used to for all tickets, for free.
They’re eliminating it because the new CEO is trying to speed-run them out of business.
Even though I’ve flown a dozen or more airlines in my life, I actually felt true loyalty towards Southwest because of their amazing no fee policies. And it was worth playing the “check in quickly cuz there’s no assigned seats” game for all the other benefits. And we’ve flown so many flights as a family due to that. It removed all the stress from the ticket purchasing process.
This CEO is a freaking idiot. Is this an excel jockey/MBA a-hole like the kind that ran Boeing and Intel into the ground?
What’s wrong with the board that voted this idiot in?
An activist investor, Elliot, acquired a significant stake in the company and organized a shareholder revolt about Southwest's margins. Paraphrasing their presentation on the issue [0]:
The plan is to make SWA as similar as possible to other airlines to get their numbers to the same place, increasing the value of already owned shares. They don't care if it destroys SWA's customer base because they'll have sold off their stake by then.[0] https://beatofhawaii.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Stronger...
Amazing. Absolute douchebag investors that ruin everything.
I see they offer free cancellations and refunds for their two top-tier tickets, but can't find a reference for them offering it for all tickets. Do you have a link?
https://mobile.southwest.com/fare-information/
https://support.southwest.com/helpcenter/s/article/policy-ch...
Before, you could cancel within 24 hours of boarding and get your full amount as at least a credit without any extra fee for any ticket class. That credit had no expiration. Now, there's a fee and expiration for this credit.
They want to benefit from passengers who don’t know their rights, because they won’t request a refund.
Similar things happened to family members multiple times where their initial flight (overseas) was delayed by 6 hours, they had many issues, and nobody provided information about their rights. I told them about what to ask for and voila, $1100 refund.
If the flight is delayed by 3 hours, you will get a refund if you cancel. This is great if the delay is long and there is a flight on a competing airline that would let you get out sooner.
Delta at least supplies a 24 hour grace period to cancel in case one made a mistake. I noticed they don't even charge cards until after this period
I think this one is required federally because every US airline allows this that I’ve flown.
It is a legal requirement.
Some will, you just have to pay an extra fee when you buy the ticket. It is ridiculous.
It will typically be in the form of a credit but United, for example, does allow cancellations (not sure how far in advance) for no charge.
I think charging a fee for passenger cancellation insurance is reasonable; the airline takes on a decent amount of risk if a consumer can cancel at any time.
I don’t think anybody’s said so far that it has to be at any time. Up to X number of days out, like most hotels, I think is perfectly reasonable.
That would be reasonable, but I think I could take it or leave it. Planes fill up more than hotels would be my guess, so they'd need a buffer window of like a month? At which point the difference between having and not having cancellation protection seems negligible to me.
I think we’re making a lot of assumptions here. For all we know one to two weeks could make a lot of sense.
I understand airlines are very feast or famine and often operate on very thin margins, but at this point I’m willing to pay a little more for the experience to not be so categorically and consistently miserable
I think for me my main gripe with air travel is how hard it is to predict the price and how high the prices are. It takes me like a day of research to book a flight due to how careful I have to be to confirm what luggage I'm allowed/etc. And it's incredibly easy for me to get burned because aggregator sites like Google flights can't tell you eg how much a carry-on would cost, so I have to try to determine if the cheaper flight is _actually_ cheaper, etc etc. And I'm tired of having family have to pay crazy hundred dollar + fees for an extra carry on because the eco light ticket (although the ticket just says eco on it) doesn't actually include a personal item, that's only part of the eco ticket, and since you're at the counter that's going to be $100 fee for you to carry a purse onto the plane. -_- Shout out Condor.
Otherwise I find everything ok. The flights are fine -- packed but it is what it is there's high demand. I could do with/without the food if it reduced the price, I can pack my own. But otherwise I find them fine.
What makes air travel miserable for you?
> Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’
Some of us parents ask that question for your benefit, not ours. Do you want to sit next to my three-year-old?
> Do you want to sit next to my three-year-old?
Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.
I know that travelling with kids is really tough. I sincerely sympathize! But it’s not a surprise that a kid needs a seat next to his parents. They know when they bought the ticket that he’ll be coming along, because they’re buying the ticket. They should select the necessary seats then.
Sure, if the airline had to move flights around then 1) they should attempt to preserve group cohesion 2) in extremis folks should negotiate. But for awhile I was getting requests from late-boarders every single time I flew. That’s not an accident: they are flying on cheap tickets and trying to get extra value. I sympathize with that too! But I pay for the value I get, and I don’t appreciate social pressure to give it away.
Then don't whine when you're sitting next to a 3 year old that has all the same justifications you do for sitting there. I don't appreciate social pressure to make your flight as comfortable as possible at my financial inconvenience.
In all seriousness I understand your point but I think it's worth considering that you're also applying social pressure.
The airline asks the age of each minor traveler when tickets are booked. The airline could perfectly well require that a kid be seated next to a caretaker. (Regardless of whether they impose an extra charge for that.)
Your gripe here is with the airline.
I believe every airline should offer a basic service: when minors are traveling with an adult, they should automatically be seated together. Ideally, airlines should provide a designated family seating area to avoid situations where a child ends up sitting next to a stranger.
This is what happens now. The proposal is to get rid of that.
> Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.
What happened to "if you want it, then you have to pay for the privilege?" If you want to be sure you aren't next to a kid, just pay for a first class ticket, instead of making other people pay extra for your comfort. You knew your preferences when you bought the ticket, after all. Select the seat you find necessary. /s
The point being that the status quo rolls dice that make everyone unhappy, and there are options for everyone to avoid it by paying extra. Those options are priced by the people creating the situation in order to make a maximally profitable 'pay to avoid this' scenario. I always pay for my family to get together, but blame the airline for making you uncomfortable, not the family.
:) tables have turned. Do you want to switch seats for a "small" fee :)
No, ok never mind, enjoy your flight.
Some of us think you're just being cheap.
I’ve definitely selected adjacent seats in the past, then ended up separated the day of the flight. Even if it’s a couple, it’s probably the airline’s fault.
I solved the problem by preferring southwest, but their new CEO is an a*hole, and instead of raising ticket prices $50 a seat is adding assigned seating, removing legroom, charging for bags, adding ticket change fees, etc, etc.
I avoid southwest because they don’t have assigned seating.
Post time traveled from when they didn't. But now they do.
Interesting, I’m sure they didn’t as recently as 4 weeks ago when I tried shopping for flights.
> Even if it’s a couple, it’s probably the airline’s fault.
Citation needed. These things happen, and the airline has some responsibility. But there's plenty of "playing dumb". Cabin crew: "You have a basic economy seat, which means you didn't get seat selection". "I didn't know!" "There's a big blue warning that pops up when you do this with a child passenger, making you acknowledge it..." "..."
Indeed, having children should have tiny nickel and dime costs all throughout your life in a million different ways. It should be the norm that just trying to raise the next generation costs you time, energy, effort, and money just to do normal day to day things, and it should especially be harder for you because you dared to have children.
Wait, why is nobody having kids?
Generally you will be expected to pay for the costs of your life decisions.
The world has more than enough people, so we shouldn't be subsidizing having children. Imbalanced demographics can be solved in other ways.
Some of us are just trying to survive financially or couldn't care less what you think.
Tough luck then buddy. Have fun with the kids.
There has to be some kind of middle ground here, imo. Nobody wants to sit next to kids. Families don't want to be penalized financially anymore than they already are for providing a benefit to society. We don't need to further disincentivize families and further our declining birth rates. At the same time it's wildly unfair to ask people to switch seats when they've paid for them (or even if they haven't).
Paying for a group to sit together is really just a roundabout way of charging extra for the middle seat that solo travelers don't want. There's something gross about it, creating a market price for a nonexistent good.
Random family seating anecdote. A couple of years ago, we were on vacation and my wife had to go home early to tend for a sick pet. My daughter and I also re-arranged our flight to get home early, and ended up in like the D boarding group (on Southwest). So we're getting on the plane and we're almost dead last, and there are very few seats left together anywhere. My 6 yr old daughter was not really emotionally equipped to sit alone at that point.
We get about 2/3 of the down and there's now nothing, so I say -- with some desperation -- "If someone would be willing to switch seats so my daughter and I can sit together I'll give you $20." A guy says "I don't want the money but I'll switch."
Which sort of shows that if you're not a jerk, and you ask nicely, often people will go out of their way to help you.
Families who seem to expect other passengers to move, especially when there's assigned seating, are another story, and deserve the condemnation they get, IMHO.
>On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege. It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it. OTOH, families are a net benefit to society, so maybe it’s right for everyone else to pitch in a bit. Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
I don't understand, are people buying random tickets and hoping to be put together once on the plane? I've literally only bought assigned seats on flights except on Southwest.
Yes, exactly. They want to avoid the upcharge for seat selection so they roll the dice and hope.
> If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege.
What privilege? Assigning seats next to each other costs airlines next to nothing (assuming they assign seats in the first place, which almost all of them do).
I ask to switch sometimes, but I always offer them the better seat and aisle-for-aisle or window-for-window. You’re sitting next to a stranger either way and I assure you that you don’t want to be sitting next to my wife when I’m the one carrying much of the gear. I’ll be passing her stuff constantly.
> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations
I believe this is referring to when the airline cancels or meaningfully changes the flight. They already don't guarantee refunds if you cancel.
> If it’s when the passenger chooses to cancel, this seems fine and fair: he paid for a flight; he chose not to take it.
It’s fair only if he does it at the last minute OR the seat goes unsold.
Automatic Refunds for Cancellations is referring to when the airline cancels. This is related to a Biden administration rule abandoned by the Trump administration: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/flight-delays-ca....
Wow that sounds like pure grift.
That Biden rule never rolled out according to the article. So what would be changing?
> Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.
This is my absolute pet hate. Most of the airlines I fly frequently with specifically throw up a dialog box making you acknowledge "I have no seat selection options with this fare", yet every flight, I'll see people doing this stupid seat dance. No, I chose the seat I wanted for a reason.
I know way too many parents who take the stance of not bothering to pay for assigned seating, on the assumption that people will move around to accommodate them.
As someone who pays for an assigned seat so I can sit where I want, this annoys the crap out of me as now they expect people like me to move.
When I point this out, their response is "why should I pay for that?"
I agree with the airlines here but if it makes life overall less stressful for all to put families together due to the bad behavior of those parents, I'm fine with it.
You don't have to engage or justify staying in your seat, just say no thank you and end the conversation
Have you never seen a confrontation erupt from this? Or a flight attendant "suggesting" the person being asked to move?
Despite flying at least 10-15 times a month on average, I have actually never seen this happen. Reddit suggests that there is an epidemic of it. The actual problem is an epidemic of terminally online dipshits making mountains out of molehills.
And yet as someone who only flies 10-15 times a year and being a terminally online dipshit, I have seen this happen. Not like one of those TikTok videos with fisticuffs, mind you.
I remember as I was annoyed that this whole thing was holding up my flight. Family asked someone to move, they declined, family kept insisting. Boarding line was getting held up due to this. FA arrives, starts imploring the man to move his seat, obviously just trying to get boarding complete so we can all move on with our lives. Eventually the man got up & changed.
No. Is there compensation given, since assigned seating costs more than non?
I've been bumped out of my paid preassigned seat for other reasons and have never received compensation.
And I'll smile back knowing you're about to have a really great flight with my 3 year old :)
(to be clear, I don't do this personally and pay extra to sit together but I do hope people start parking their kids all over the plane since that's what we all seem to want! It's tempting.)
So according to you: they should give up their paid seat so that you don't have to pay for assigned seats, even when you know way in advance that you are traveling with a 3 yr old?
Let's ignore special cases where you didn't have a chance to buy assigned seats, and focus on the vastly more common scenario where parents can easily pay to ensure seats of their choice.
Yes, it's nickel and diming by the airlines to make all seat assignments paid. And hating airlines is completely justified.
But I find the entitlement of parents, that other passengers should accommodate their parsimonious preferences, just amazing.
Flying has become such a terrible experience that I avoid it all costs. I'd love to take more trips, but the service is so poor that I can't justify supporting it more than absolutely necessary. I doubt anything will change though, the majority of other people seem to not really care.
I'm with you. If I can't drive there, I don't go. Between the TSA, cramped seats, fees, unhelpful staff, angry passengers, angry staff, turbulence, the lousy food and dealing with carry-ons/luggage -- it's not worth it (for me, personally). My last flight was 2019 and I don't miss it at all.
We take fewer, but longer, vacations, and use the extra time to drive to our destination. We try to avoid freeways as much as possible so we can see smaller places. We make vague plans and stop when we get tired or hungry.
I know it won't work for everybody, but it works for us and I love it.
Either it's a business necessity or it's a "tax" on recreational vacations once or twice a year. In semi-retirement I've told many people my goal is to keep traveling but arrange things so I spend less time in airports and planes. Of course, I can spend more money to make longer flights less onerous.
As annoying as it is to be nickel and dimed I really can't complain when thinking about what is actually on offer. If I told my ancestors I was unhappy about traveling 2000 miles in 5 hours for $250 they'd rightfully slap me over the head. What a historically unprecedented capability for our species to end up on the opposite side of the planet in about a half a day.
Just a few short months ago we had an administration that pushed and got some fair rules created. It is crazy to me that people can’t see how transparently anti-consumer the current administration is.
This is part of the reason I don't fly so much anymore. In the last 10 flights I flew, only 2 arrived on time. For one flight I was delayed in D/FW for 72 hours. I haven't had a flight on United that wasn't canceled or rescheduled or I was bumped in about 10 years. And the behaviour of the airlines has been getting MUCH worse over time. The Alaska flight from DFW to SEA that was delayed 72 hours... They originally weren't going to refund me for canceling it. I had to get a lawyer involved. I should not have to get a lawyer and a local TV news crew involved to reschedule a canceled flight.
I drive a lot more these days and if Amtrak was better I would take the train more often. I get to catch up on podcasts while driving and usually do it over the weekend so I can stop and see out-of-the-way roadside attractions. Before driving I-80 between Reno and Salt Lake, I never realized how empty some sections of the country are.
I'd be curious to hear if this is happening in Europe or Asia.
I flew a LOT pre-covid, and still more than average post-covid (2-4 times a year), and primarily via United (thanks to racked-up miles from the Continental days) out of Houston/NYC/London, and I have never had any issues with delays or cancellations - In 2009, a Continental flight did have me circling IAH for 2 hours while they troubleshot a landing gear malfunction before landing again and switching planes, though, but that is the only issue I remember, and I was flying 2-5 flights/week at that point between HOU/NYC/LAX/DEN.
The handful of times I've flown Southwest have been slightly less than perfect, but some of that was user error not understanding how Southwest worked compared to normal carriers.
I don't want to discount yours, or the thousands upon thousands of reports about United or Southwest, but in my experience, it has been pretty solid on both counts.
I'm flying out of the west and have to go through SLC or DEN when flying United. It's ALWAYS a PITA. Now that I think about it... I had a segment a couple years ago on United from JAX to ORD that was delayed only 5 minutes and wound up arriving 5 minutes early, so maybe east of the Rockies things are better. And my brother tells me international flights on Untied through SFO to Asia are generally pretty stable.
I bet if I looked at where flights originated, United is doing a East to West pattern and there are just fewer opportunities for cascading delays to impact people getting on the plane in the east. Comparing with Alaska, which has other problems, but hasn't canceled too many flights on me, I bet most of the flights I take originate out of SEA going south or east, so you don't have that same pattern.
Also... Southwest... I remember when it was a good airline. Just another example of what hedge funds can do to you. FWIW, they have a train at DFW now that will take you to either downtown Ft. Worth or downtown Dallas (or even Las Colinas. Or DENTON. I took a train from DFW to "downtown" DENTON once!!! The wonders never cease.) I would love to see LUV field step up it's mass trans game.
Now that you are saying that, I wonder if HOU to LAX or LAS is better served because it stays south of the Rockies. And since I've almost always been based out of Houston, or when I lived in NYC, flying home to HOU or vacationing in DEN, those flights never had to cross the Rockies.
I bet you are on to something.
Europe is looking better and better every day.
i’m hard-pressed to think of an industry whose financial principles i’m more skeptical of than the airline industry. post-9/11 the industry cratered and they said they needed to add fees to keep from going bankrupt. united created ted, their own low-cost no-frills carrier which was actually decent. once air travel recovered, they (airlines, in general) kept the fees and have been turning record profits ever since. united dumped ted so that they could return to focus on squeezing customers there.
i love travel but i hate dealing with airlines. their executives rank up there with health insurance as some of my least favorite personalities.
and one last thing, other than (eventually) telecom way back in the 80s, has there ever been an industry whose deregulation has been a net win for consumers? i’m genuinely curious and not asking sarcastically
Looking at the numbers, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines#Business_trend...
United had their highest revenue in 2024, and their profit margin was... 5.5%. Would reducing your ticket price by 5.5% make any difference?
also, don’t forget (well known fact) that passengers paying for premium economy and business class seats are the most profitable for the airlines - by far. Aside from profits from credit card rewards programs.
so the profit margin on economy tickets is likely even smaller than 5.5%!
I have no doubt that if they could fill the plane with 200 business class travelers they would. But that group simply isn't big enough outside of routes to New York or Shanghai.
The 747 became the queen of the skies because it carried 400 tourists to Málaga, Okinawa and Ft Lauderdale.
The fees will only bring in extra revenue if they're a surprise, or some sort of impulse buy. I'm not sure that'll keep happening.
We're already at the point where people don't trust the listed price of flights and hotel bookings (Vegas has made hotel resort fees globally famous). It just seems the long term result is everyone will use some app to calculate the real cost of their trip, and what those apps display will be the real list price.
The airlines and the FAA have been reducing seat size and weight for "safety reasons". 21" width minimum required in 1995 only 18" width in 2025. These seat requirements directly corrolate to fuel cost savings, and passenger density. Simple statistical manipulation with the increase in passengers shrinks the fatality and accident rate because the sample is larger. The airlines are to the FAA as what wall street is to the SEC.
> Instead of the clear, itemized pricing system that passengers currently rely on, airlines could hide fees until later in the booking process…
They call what we have now “clear”? Where when looking at a page of flights I don’t know how much the multitude of economy/economy+/economy++/premium economy/business/business++ seats will cost until I click on each flight? Where every carrier offers slightly different variations of these seats such that I can’t cross-shop on Google Flights?
Is that the clear and transparent system the airlines are complaining about?
Those are all optional fees.
What they want is a return to the old pre-Obama days where all the taxes and mandatory fees (government and stuff they made up) were only displayed at check out. Kind of like resort fees on hotels.
yeah, now imagine when its even worse
it was worse in the 80's-90's...I guess the past few years of enjoying refunds was not meant to last...
It absolutely was not worse in the 80s. Unless you mean more expensive. Yes. It DEFINITELY was more expensive. When I booked through a travel agent or over the phone with the airline, the fees were pretty transparent. I sorta feel for the airlines here because before deregulation they had to commit to unprofitable routes before they realized HOW unprofitable they would be. That cost was spread over the profitable routes and ultimately everything was more expensive. But... oh man... remember when you could get on a flight where only about 25% of the seats were filled and the food wasn't great, but was free? I remember being able to lift the arm-rests on seats up and stretch out and take a nap on the plane. Those were the days. Before American's MD/SD-80s started falling out of the sky, I would fly out to DFW from SJC each week and it was delightful.
And baggage handling systems are much better than the 80s. It's been 5 years since an airline has lost checked luggage for me. But of course, it's been 5 years since I checked luggage, so who knows? I really miss Yamato 宅配便 from when I lived in Japan. Americans really don't know how to travel correctly.
Meh. The dollar is probably going to be devalued soon so the dream of air travel for the typical American will likely only be in the rear-view mirror. We'll all be lost in wistful nostalgia about the time when normal people could afford air travel.
So... SOME things were worse in the 80s/90s. Not all things related to traveling.
> It's been 5 years since an airline has lost checked luggage for me.
It hasn't even been two weeks for me, although my luggage arrived the next day. I remember on Slashdot hearing the advice of always packing a firearm (even a starter pistol) in checked luggage when traveling domestically—not only is it legal, but the BATFE gets involved if the airline loses your luggage, so the airline is very careful not to lose your luggage.
No sure why this comment got downvoted. The 90s were more of no hidden fees at all. You paid the ticket, and that's it. Usually 2 baggages were included in the flight (standard), and food was free. US inland trips had crappy snacks, and some soda, but international ones all had food and drinks, including alcoholic ones.
Prices of tickets were more expensive for sure, so air travel was more of a luxury.
The era of the hidden fees started during the late Bush era, and with the advents of online booking, and with the rise of the 'cheap airlines' like RyanAir, Spirit, etc...
They had hidden fees as part of their busisness model. The larger carriers started following suit with more restricitons for the cheapest base tickets (no luggage) and more fees for things that used to be included before.
This is completely different from the 90s, which you paid and things were more upfront.
I could have gotten my decades wrong. I just remember not being able to get refunds by default, and then it was a glorious past several years where JetBlue and southwest would automagically refund my tickets back to my credit card.
I’ve seen the movie Brazil and I wish more people had so they would have voted better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Looks interesting!
It's a must watch movie -- there's multiple editions and you should watch the directors cut.
I know that "me too" comments are frowned upon, but I really feel the need to chime in here. Brazil is my favorite movie of all time. It is eerily prescient. It's important to keep in mind while watching it today that it was made forty years ago.
And yes, the director's cut. Absolutely the director's cut.
Is your form stamped? There's no stamp on it.
This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your receipt.
We're all in this together, kid.
Don't forget the inverse can happen, like when tech-bros read sci-fi and end up thinking Bad Thing is a good idea... :|
I love/hate how many people in tech watched Black Mirror and went "that's a great idea! I'll build that"
I see the causality as reversed: the show is based on extrapolating current tech trends to produce near-future dystopian sci-fi.
geez, can you people stop tearing down the torment nexus for just one minute!
Ah yes, the Torment Nexus from the popular sci-fi book, "Don't build the Torment Nexus!"
I'm not sure why you think that would've helped. A lot of the people who won't shut up about 1984 and Ayn Rand still vote for the closest thing to monarchy they can find on their ballots.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us."
We're at a point where people would be glad to starve if they think it pissed someone else off.
I think most of them would say that right up until they could actually feel the hunger. People spend hundreds of dollars on drugs that just make them less hungry so they eat less. So I don't think so.
Some people see "don't tread on me" as "don't tread on people," while others see it as "don't tread on ME specifically."
Don't tread on me but please do tread on those other people I've been indoctrinated to dislike.
"tread on them especially hard"
Okay - democrats will push us in 1984 dystopia where they force you to accept that reality is what they tell you, and republicans will push us in low life high tech Cyberpunk dystopia where corporations reign supreme. Choose your poison.
Which reality is that? The real reality? Admittedly real reality is a pretty bitter pill at times.
Maybe the one where biological sex is imaginary. Or the one where Biden's health is good enough for another four years. You pick (or keep looking the other way and losing, to the detriment of far more important issues).
FWIW, like "conservatives" the stereotypes are not universal. They may not even be typical.
Biological sex clearly is not a fiction; we have lots of evidence that it's not something you choose. It's also not necessarily binary, even in humans, although it is mostly binary.
I also did not believe that Biden was ready for four more years, but then again, what choice did I have? I would not have voted for Trump under any circumstances, and sitting it out would be giving my vote away.
You're painting with a rather broad brush. You must have at least a few liberals in your life with whom you can compare notes.
oh, like that classic Democrat line "tylenol causes autism"?
We are talking about the same hepatotoxic compound that is absurdly easy to OD on but it gives negligible relief on stuff you should just power trough? That anecdotal - is barely better than a pacebo?
Personally - I think that the two main drivers of autism are people having kids later and too high rates of smart people intermarriage.
Of course Trump should not have said Tylenol, but paracetamol.
And there are some very mild hints in the data that they are correlated, but not enough sigmas.
And of course it could be Tylenol and something else with which ot interacts. And autism is so hard to be linked to anything because of how big the umbrella is and that we have such high delay to diagnosis that we will never know. Not taking medications when not really necessary is probably a good precaution principle
But if he can't say "acetaminophen" how can he say "paracetamol"?
Nobody in America says paracetamol. The generic drug is called acetaminophen in America.
Anyway, it works very well for the aches and pains that come from manual labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
My point is merely that the lie against reality is being perpetrated by Republicans. You never really addressed that.
This is a pro level feature set. I don't think most flyers feel bilked that they can't do this. Absolute price sensitivity (meaning bottom line, not "cheapest business class") is the factor for most people and that is easy to see on any of the flight search engines.
For most perhaps, but I want to know what I'll really pay. I already know I'm going to check luggage (or not, but now that I have kids and am going for longer vacations checked bags is not something I'll do without), so I want to see the price with checked bags. Likewise I know I'm willing to pay for the legroom of economy plus (the rest of my family doesn't care, though my kids are soon hit their final growth and soon will). I've just added $1000 to my actually price, but all I see is the per person ticket price with no options...
There is a reason I took Amtrak last vacation. Too bad they doen't go do where my next vacation will be.
Not to mention the lack of standards on leg room/entertainment packages/food quality for any of the above combinations on any airline!
I literally don't fit in certain carriers' seats because my legs are longer than their seat pitch.
You want regulations on in-flight entertainment packages??
At least Google flights shows you an estimate for the airline
You can always buy an economy plus ticket.
The point wasn't minimums, it was that you don't even know what an "economy plus ticket" will get you since it's not standardized.
What airlines are you searching on?
Whenever I search (admittedly mostly on Southwest), I get everything up front.
Well rule #1 is never to book a flight on a third party travel portal. When things go wrong, you now have to deal with the travel portal and the airline.
Many people will do things like use Google Travel to narrow down an initial set of potential flights based on times & cost, and then go to the individual airlines from there to book things. The GPs post is still a problem in this scenario.
Kayak has a flag to limit tickets shown to only those sold by airlines. That's the way to go.
That seems like a Google problem because of a poor interface. Unless you want each airline to standardize their offerings. Even then their would be differences based on loyalty programs, which airline you have a credit card for etc.
The legislation nor the regulations were geared toward third party aggregators.
Google Flights isn’t a third party portal! It takes you directly to the airline web site to book. It attempts to estimate the fare price but that’s becoming increasingly difficult with variably priced seats and other “gotcha” expenses that get figured in deep into the booking flow.
For domestic flights, perhaps. It routinely refers me to third party OTAs for the cheapest prices on flights to less common international destinations.
And in that case, this was never regulated by the government. The airlines shouldn’t be responsible for how their products are presented on a random aggregator.
If each flight leg is a different price, how can the website show you the total until you select both (or all) legs?
FWIW, at least as of today, American Airlines' website attempts to show you round trip prices.
When choosing your outbound leg(s), they show a price inclusive of the cheapest return journey on the day you selected to return using the class of service on your outbound leg. So, there's all sorts of ways for it to be incorrect - maybe you want a different class of service, maybe the cheapest return has a stop but you'd like the direct, etc. - but it's still really useful for figuring out the best options for your flights.
Kayak.com does it... it's very much a UX choice of whether to show combinations of flights at a given "level" (economy/main/1st class) or instead dedicate the space to showing the prices at all levels, and only show a flight at a time.
They usually show you a minimum, then have you select each leg, with the price for that leg fully displayed.
That doesn't mean it's not opaque and complicated.
"We can't tell you the exact price because you haven't told us what you want to buy yet" isn't opaque or complicated.
The context is making pricing more opaque than it needs to be in order to earn more money.
I don’t understand how it could be made simpler, unless you want every flight to cost the same, which is stupid. Hence the complaint does not make sense.
It seems like the smart play here is a three step process:
1) Deregulate claiming that competition will lower costs
2) Further consolidate carriers so that there is even less competition
3) Profit!
With the corporate buyout of government, it won't be long until we see the announcement for the new AmDelTed.
This has worked so far, though. Prices are down ~50% after inflation since the airlines were deregulated.
There might be other factors to consider, such as seat density and maintenance costs. Plus that deregulation was a massive change compared to whether or not they can use the AirBnB price quote model.
The cost savings has also come from efficiency gains like winglets & jet bridges, and service reductions like going from meal service to snacks to nothing, the removal of amenities (remember playing cards and wing pins for kids?), little or no in-flight entertainment, etc.
No, service is down 50% after inflation. Regulated tickets included things like sufficient leg room and snacks and luggage. Now all that costs extra.
While US airlines are lobbying to roll back passenger protections and add fees, the EU is moving the opposite way - now pushing rules to standardize free carry-on and checked baggage sizes across all airlines[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250627-the-big-change-a...
The entire industry generates money by means of dark patterns. Per my interactions with people, almost 100% of consumers are constantly pissed off at the unending deception. Given this is their modus operandi, I don't trust a word the industry tells me.
I'm in favor of stronger regulation, actually.
I agree that transparency is important. All charges known up front.
That said, I think a fundamental problem is that sir travel is too cheap. That's the motivation behind all the nutty fees.
Surely there would be a market for an airline (or a class of seating) where you get a decent seat, with no gimmicks and up-charges? And not for triple the price like business class?
Isn't this just regular seating (of any class) on one of the non-discount airlines?
I fly a couple times a month with Alaska or Delta, economy tickets only, and this is always my experience. No weird fees, price known up front, the seat is fine, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Airlines
"For many years, all flights featured 2-by-2 leather seating (in aircraft usually fitted with 3-2 seating), ample legroom, complimentary gourmet meals, and warm chocolate chip cookies. This made the airline popular with business travelers. In addition, Midwest Express operated a sizable executive charter operation with a specially configured DC-9."
As more legislators (and supreme court judges) use their donors' private airplanes, how much will they think about the typical flight experience?
In Canada, we've already learned to always fly a European airline when possible. We have some legal protections but Canadian airlines are happy to put people on a complaint waiting list instead of doing anything - it's pretty laughable. As of August, there's 85k complaints waiting. It's a 1.5-2 years wait.
https://otc-cta.gc.ca/eng/air-travel-complaints-resolution-p...
There is a 90 day decision timeframe starting from the time of submitting a complaint.
But note: > Due to a high volume of complaints, there will be a delay between when a complaint is submitted and waits in the queue and when the complaint process will start.
wat
Like Amazon, "Two day shipping!"...
"Two days from when we actually ship it, which might be today, but might be tomorrow, or in three days from now..."
So... it's kinda like healthcare?
> Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges.
I'm against rolling back all of the other ones mentioned, but this one, I don't have a problem with charging a fee to be seated together. Most airlines let you pay to pick seats anyway.
Let what happens in America, stay in America. All of it.
Get a 403 from EU. Is there a better source?
These are the main points listed in the article:
* Automatic Refunds for Cancellations: Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. Passengers may instead receive only vouchers or no compensation at all, leaving them without recourse in the event of a major flight disruption.
* Transparency of Fees: The airlines also aim to strip away rules that require them to disclose all fees (like baggage, seat assignments, and service charges) upfront. Instead of the clear, itemized pricing system that passengers currently rely on, airlines could hide fees until later in the booking process, making the true cost of a ticket much higher than expected.
* Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
* Accessibility Protections for Disabled Passengers: The deregulation proposal also targets protections for disabled passengers, weakening their access to support and assistance during air travel.
Nasty site full of a gazillion trackers etc.
“The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) encourages all airlines to guarantee that young children are seated adjacent to an accompanying adult without charging any additional fee.” https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/airline-family-se...
There is not coverage beyond one adult already in the US. With an additional adult and one child, the airlines already adds in fees. It’s also non-transparent when booking that they have made sure the easy path is the charged path, especially now that airlines make you pay to guarantee being seated together prior to flight checkin 24 hours in advance of takeoff.
> Automatic Refunds for Cancellations: Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. Passengers may instead receive only vouchers or no compensation at all, leaving them without recourse in the event of a major flight disruption.
Basically half of flights I've ever booked have had a cancellation. Usually the airline customer service had to rebook a new itinerary for the same purpose, but once in the past year they had to issue a refund because all possible routes went through DFW and they had lightning, which they have all the time.
It's absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that you should be able to take someone's money and not render services. That's a fundamental part of commerce.
Yeah; I wonder if this is going to lead to chargebacks.
I wonder if there are any anti-retaliation provisions, or if they’ll just have a special no-fly list for people they sold non-existent flights to, and that refused to pay up.
That's literally why chargebacks exist. Whoever drafted this particular idea must not be very familiar with how card payments work.
They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.
>Basically half of flights I've ever booked have had a cancellation.
You would seem to be a very unlucky person. My record is somewhere in the low single digits. Obviously, my percentage of flights with some delays has been somewhat higher.
> no compensation at all, leaving them without recourse in the event of a major flight disruption
Would airlines even get away with that, given that card payments for non-provided services can usually be trivially charged back?
Presumably business travelers would not always care enough, but their company's expense management department certainly would.
> * Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.
Capitalist money-making idea: guarantee young children are seated as far away as possible from their parents if the fee is not paid, then offer to collect the fee from other passengers seated next to the child. Double the cost if it's a baby.
I am in the EU and I get 200
Data point: it worked for me, also in the EU.
https://archive.is/wWXqY
Works for me.
I would pay more for an announcement-free flight. I watch the safety briefing ahead of time, and nobody speaks over the insanely-loud PA system the entire time I'm on the airplane.
Opportunity for AI agents to deep dive into all the options and provide user friendly view?
I haven't flown anywhere since 2013ish, maybe more people should stop supporting it. Convert airports into space for housing.
US airlines discovered, during and after covid, that shipping prices were astronomical for some materials and some destinations. The airlines began taking on more packages, and less people. Now the airlines are allowing passengers to compete with these new package-pound-per-dollar rates. It's not unexpected. Now the safety measures are getting in the way of the package-pound-per-dollar and the airlines are seeking a way to scurry out from under these safety measures.
This is undesirable behavior, but how can a meat-package compete with a rare-metals, rare-earths, or even small aluminum shipment? The cost of shipping goods has risen astronomically since covid. Meat-packages now must compete. We're losing the competition.
I'm surprised the world isn't moving more towards "Nutrition" labels for pricing.
the pink elephant is whether a triple-bogey on a par-five hole acctounts for the disappearance of the airport terminus pass.
Man, I hate headlines like this. It may be true that what they're doing is evil but I feel like I'm not allowed to have my own opinion.
High speed rail can't come soon enough.
I think the airlines don’t realize that all the rules in place now make flying more tolerable and even enjoyable.
If the airlines jerk me around I’m more likely to just not buy a ticket and stay home. If they make it a great experience it’s something I’m going to look forward to.
Pleasant prospect indeed!
I fly a lot and let me put in context one of the “protections” as far as parents being seated with children or at least how it works on Delta.
If you buy their lowest fare - which they try their best to steer you away from and they say prominently in big bold type avive where you order your ticket that you will not be able to choose your seat - you cannot in fact choose your seat. Then parents complain and people who did pay to choose their seat are forced to move so kids can sit with their parents.
The rest of the items that the airline wants to roll back are foot guns for infrequent travelers.
Ironically in Europe we have some decent regulation for airlines, but the public train operating companies refuse to do the same for trains. We need to have some of those same protection and transparency requirements for train companies as well.
But the governments of the big operating companies have vetoed this so far. Sometimes deregulation actually makes it easier to implement regulation.
One of the best things to happen lately in the UK is "Delay Repay": https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/help-and-assistance/compensat...
Made it much easier to get compensation for delayed and canceled trains. ( Of which there are many ).
It's not a significant amount for minor delays, but it makes traveling on trains just that little bit less miserable.
Your trains are at least 10x better than US airlines from a passenger perspective.
Train operators aren't as strictly regulated because they can't do as much harm, both in terms of the inherent catastraophic consequences of air travel disasters for passengers and bystanders, and in terms of the financial risk that passengers take on by purchasing a ticket. A no-refunds-for-cancellations policy on a $100 intercity train ticket that rarely ever cancels hits different from a $400 flight itinerary that cancels multiple times a week because of normal weather.
I don't think that's true. If you book a connection that involves multiple high speed trains across multiple country you can easily pay 1000s of $. Its actually more then many direct flights in Europe.
And for example if you take TGV from Paris to the German border, and you have to get on an ICE. If the TGV is late, you miss the connection to the ICE, and have to sleep in the border town, TGV doesn't have to pay.
And missing connection is quite common, specially because Germany is ... not very German.
In terms of safety, a train accident can kill 100s of people. They just don't happen very often.
Have you compared the cost of a train to a flight in Europe? Often the flight is _substantially_ cheaper, especially in the UK.
> the public train operating companies refuse to do the same for trains. We need to have some of those same protection and transparency requirements for train companies as well.
Huh? We do!
There are very similar EU regulations for train travel: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
On a completely unrelated note, I recently noticed that Deutsche Bahn seems to have some of their train schedules staggered by 58 minutes instead of one hour – which means that the 25% refund for a delayed arrival due to a missed connection that didn't wait will usually not kick in :)
I didn't say there was no regulation what so ever. But there were multiple efforts of increasing it that was blocked. And what I specifically noted that the rights are weaker then for airlines.
If your airline is delayed and you miss a connection, you will get a hotel for the night. In a train, you can get that.
Airlines are forced to compete on price and have to publicly list prices and make that accessible to 3rd parties. Train companies do everything in their power to silo as much as they can to force costumers into booking threw their app.
> Airlines are forced to compete on price and have to publicly list prices
Which regulation requires airlines to do so? I was under the impression that airlines mainly make their inventory available via GDSes for historical reasons (for decades before direct online booking, airlines would sell most of their tickets through travel agents, which needed unified interfaces).
There are some low-cost airlines that don't embrace GDSes and force you to use their app as well (I've been bitten by that once when booking through a "non-cooperative OTA/reseller and not being able to access my boarding pass), and conversely, I think some train connections are selling tickets to travel agencies these days.
> If your airline is delayed and you miss a connection, you will get a hotel for the night. In a train, you can get that.
Sure? EU regulation 2021/782, article 20 would disagree: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...
They can’t in Europe because of … mmm let me check … oh yeah: REGULATION.
You should try your REGULATION trick with Lufthansa's customer support.
I did. It worked without issues on my end.
Did many times. It has to work and they have to pay.
just wait till Trump gives them another deal they can't refuse lol
The rest of the world's already discovered an easy out: negotiate by promising to do what you've already been doing for the past decade. As long as he hasn't been fed some idea to fixate on, he's an easy mark that can be placated by literally anything.
Canada just allowed the USA to have control over their nuclear plants and waste for 20 years.
South Korea had to publicly come out and say they wanted to accept Trump's deal, but it had to have some concessions or else they would go into economic collapse!
And the EU just allowed something like 30% more access from USA food which was previously considered not fit for human consumption under their health laws right? Please correct my figures if they're wrong.
I found your comment insightful and informative, until I saw this:
> Please correct my figures if they're wrong.
I guess the numbers could be wrong, and the comment completely unreliable.
I echo what some already stated. I think this topic if real needs to be known. Problem is that I cannot find any reference where this information is coming from.
Give me a link, document, reference, or something to back up the claims. Otherwise it comes across as FUD.
Interesting. The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers.
I suppose we’ve just given up on the concept of trying to do anything but nakedly extract profit at any cost. You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that.
Edit: I mean short-term profits. As a shareholder I would prefer long-term profits via competition and diversification.
Monopoly by underhanded treachery offers better odds at long-term profits than a long, drawn-out competition on fair terms.
>You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that.
The end game of capitalism is monopoly. Why would shareholders want competition that prevents them from extracting maximum profit?
What are you talking about overall, deregulation of routes has not been bad for consumers. The opposite actually.
It’s been a disaster. There are fewer routes, and flying is miserable, and getting worse every year. Crashes are way up this year.
Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket. Adding $10 per trip would be some sort of fantasy land windfall for the shareholders.
Deregulation badly broke this industry.
Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much.
Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff.
You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines.
>they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much
Basically. I have used a combination of miles and co-pays to upgrade to business trans-Pacific. But most of the time going from the east coast US to Europe (especially when I can do it without a red-eye to London), I end up thinking of all the nice stuff I could do with $5K at the cost of sort of a miserable flight.
It's not that I couldn't splurge but there are other things I'd generally prefer to splurge on.
One reason flights are more miserable is planes are more heavily loaded. Before deregulation, planes were usually ~50% full. Today in the US, it's about 84%.
This is directly correlated with airfares. Were planes as sparsely loaded now as they were then then fares would be correspondingly higher. But in a deregulated environment there's a very strong incentive for increased economic efficiency to keep the fares competitive.
I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both.
This is pretty much false. If you compare inflation adjusted cost you now get a far better service for the same price, and you get access at a price that literally wasn't possible before.
> and flying is miserable
It isn't. I have flowing with budget airlines in Europe and its, basically fine. Not luxury but really its incredibly value.
On the same price as you did before, you now get luxury.
> Crashes are way up this year.
What the fuck does 'this year' have to do with it when we are talking about something that happened in around the 1980s.
Total safety is up massively, and per passenger safety is up by an absurd amount.
Any counter-argument to this is literally not credible.
> Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket.
So capitalism works? Not sure what your point is.
> Deregulation badly broke this industry.
Based on what?
> The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers.
What the actual F? Deregulation of airlines was massively beneficial to consumers.
"Base ticket prices have declined steadily since deregulation.[15] The inflation-adjusted 1982 constant dollar yield for airlines has fallen from 12.3 cents in 1978 to 7.9 cents in 1997,[16] and the inflation-adjusted real price of flying fell 44.9% from 1978 to 2011.[17] Along with a rising U.S. population[18] and the increasing demand of workforce mobility, these trends were some of the catalysts for dramatic expansion in passenger miles flown, increasing from 250 million passenger miles in 1978 to 750 million passenger miles in 2005.[19]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation
How do the real price reductions compare to the rest of the world? Computers automated away a ton of airline jobs, and fuel economy has increased.
Also, are those prices apples to apples with pre-deregulation tickets?
Like, can I just walk up to the terminal, same day, pay that price, and get the equivalent of business class on the plane, and still pay 44% less than real 1978 prices?
Base ticket prices doesn’t seem like a great metric, not that I have a better trivial to measure metric off the top of my head (maybe leg room?), but competition has certainly gone down since deregulation.
Trump really has enabled grifting en mass. Any semblance of corporate responsibility out of the window.
Don't forget that it was Delta airlines that lobbied the Biden administration that got CDC to reduce isolation duration. Both administrations are deadly liars. When it comes to the airlines, the last administration's deregulation killed people, a lot of them. Not that if Trump was in power he would have done anything different.
TLDR version: The Airlines are turning into TicketMaster.
One of my biggest regrets is not travelling the length and breadth of the US two decades ago when I had an opportunity.
What with orange two-chins in charge, MAGA, ICE, deregulation across the board, and the general shit-housery that seems to be going on over there, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to attempt it again in my lifetime ... it's not the actual travel that is the issue, it would be the non-stop gag-reflex on landing ...
RIP USA ...
Is it just me or is this an awful “article”? It mention deregulation but doesn’t point to what specific regulations have been removed. I took a Delta flight 2 weeks ago (one that supposedly had implemented all of these draconian rollbacks) and had the same experience I’ve had for the past 10 years:
- price of the ticket was as advertised - a checked bag was an option at the same price it has always been. - I was able to assign a seat next to my husband without additional fees.
Now while this flight was not cancelled, I’ve had to reschedule some flights with Delta due to illness previously and they just gave me a 100% credit for the cost of the flight that was easy to use.
The only contrast for cancellation I know is the nightmare of Air Canada. In the past I’ve had flights get cancelled and only got “vouchers” that could only be used by calling a specific number that took 1 hour+ and were not applicable for taxes (you know half the cost of a Canadian Airline Ticket), and would be lost of not fully used in one purchases
Air Canada vouchers also expire in one year. I had the misfortune of having a flight cancelled at the beginning of COVID. They never refunded me, because apparently you had to go fill a form to apply for a refund within a few days of cancellation. Air Canada is the worst.
I honestly think it's pretty amazing how cheap air travel already is in the USA and Europe. It explains why we're seeing all time highs for air travel.
The air industry seems like a good example of just the right level of regulation: There's tons of competition, different pricing tiers with their corresponding levels of quality, and a lot of dynamism combined with a good set of consumer base regulations (24 hour cancellation period, for example).
This might be the case if all your travel boils down to off season direct flights between major airports.
In my experience, it has been rapidly going up in price and down in quality since the end of the pandemic. You have very few protections as a passenger, and while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue with the way support lines work with airlines.
To add insult to the injury, look up the history of bailouts airlines have received.
> while you may have some rights on paper, they have been made excruciatingly difficult to pursue
Are you in the US? In the EU there are many websites that help you get a cancellation/delay refund, they require little more than your boarding pass, and they work very well for a small (sometimes none) fee. The fee is taken from your refund so if you don't get one, you don't have to pay anything.
You probably work for Boeing lmao
A large chunk of the population voted for this. Good going losers.