CairoCarol, I’m talking about bigger families, usually with two parents. They all want to be together, or want a parent with every kid, regardless of age. Sorry, but a 9 year old isn’t going to die if he’s in the window seat by himself. In fact, it’s a great way to give them a little freedom. It’s all a part of helicopter parenting. From 2004-2006 I flew roundtrip every 6 weeks and the families take the longest to board, are the loudest and most inconsiderate and make everyone else’s life generally miserable. Now I only fly on holidays and am subjected to them and their inexperience and lack of respect* for flying even more.
*By lack of respect I mean clogging security, arriving without plenty of time, not preparing the kids with toys and snacks, letting their children run amok and generally being a clusterfuck on the whole procedure.
The wife and I recently flew domestically on Thai AirAsia, the Thai subsidiary of Malaysian-based AirAsia. We declined to predesignate our seats ahead of time online, figuring it was a short flight and we didn’t care where we sat. But upon check-in, we were seated far apart from each other. What the …? AirAsia does have a feature online that allows you to ensure your party all stays together, for a small fee, even if you don’t designate specific seats, but we figured that was for larger groups.
And we were not the only ones inconvenienced, as the couple who ended up sitting next to me had been separated from someone else. As soon as we had taken off from Bangkok and the seatbelt light went off, there was a small game of musical chairs as several of us got up and switched around. My wife did finally get to sit next to me.
There was no problem like this on our return flight.
Well, if you specifically decline to predesignate your seats, then it’s pretty likely that the people who DO predesignate their seats are going to choose the ones where they can sit together, and if enough people do that, then you might end up separated.
To tell the truth, unless it’s a honking great trans-Pacific flight, i’ve never been especially bothered by the idea of not being able to sit together. Once or twice, my wife and i have ended up in different parts of the plane; once on a full cross-country flight from Baltimore to the west coast, and once on a two-hour trip from Baltimore to Chicago.
I sleep in the same bed as my wife, and am with her for much of our waking time as well. A few hours apart, in a situation where we wouldn’t be talking much anyway (we both tend to sleep or zone out to music on a plane), isn’t a big deal for either of us.
Some people are incredibly obsessed about it, though.
A couple of years ago, my wife was on a flight from the east coast to Denver. What’s that? About 4 hours or so? Anyway, she had managed to snag herself a window seat, which is what she likes. After she boarded, it turned out that there was a guy sitting next to her (in the middle seat), and the guy’s wife was directly behind him (in the middle seat, one row back). Obviously, they had been separated by the seat allocation process.
Anyway, the guy asked my wife if she would mind swapping with his wife, so that the couple could sit together. Essentially, asking her to give up her window seat and sit in the middle. Hell no! They asked all four people who were around them in the window and aisle seats, but no-one was interested. So, for the whole flight, the guy had his arm raised and his hand hanging over the back of his seat so that his girlfriend behind him could hold his hand!
Jesus H. Christ. If you can’t bear to be more than two feet apart for a four-hour plane flight, there’s something wrong with you.
Gotcha. No argument from me, then. My son has been sitting by himself on airplane for a long time now … maybe I am a Bad Mommy, but I actually enjoy the time alone.
Flying to the UK shortly using Qantas (and Partner British Air).
For the 16 hour leg we have pre booked good seats via British Air- they cost $36 each but that seems a small price. (There are a couple of seats at the back of a Jumbo which occupy about 2 1/2 space- due to the curvature of the plane they can’t fit three there).
With Qantas, they don’t seem to have presales but you can select your seat online 24 hours or such in advance.
I don’t think too many people who currently have young children would give you a hard time about that. I love the Firebug more than I can say, but if I didn’t occasionally get a break from the little rascal, he’d drive me nuts.
That actually makes you an Awesome Mommy in my book :D. Seriously, your kid will be the one who calls you the first week of college and say “Mom, there are kids here who don’t know how to balance their checking account/make their bed/do their laundry/ask for help from a professor/make a reservation at a restaurant.” And you will be fully validated as an awesome mom who prepared their kid for the real world.
Speaking as a guy married to a BBW, Southwest handles it quite well, thanks. You buy two seats, and they give you a ‘seat reserved’ card to put on the seat next to you that you bought.
But here’s the really great thing: if the flight’s not full, they’ll refund you the money you paid for the extra seat. You have to send them a letter, after you get back, with your reservation number and the fact that you bought the extra seat, but it’s a great deal.
Traveling around Thanksgiving, chances are slim that the flight will fail to sell out, so this may not help you then. But we got the cost of the extra seat refunded probably around 2/3 of the time we flew Southwest.
And FWIW, Sheremetyevo is really two distinct airports, SVO-1 and SVO-2; they’re both international airports, but one of them (SVO-2 I think) just does flights within what used to be the USSR, while the other does the ‘true’ international flights.
But having done the Moscow-Samara roundtrip three times, I didn’t feel like I was about to get trampled or anything getting off at either end of that route. And I was flying with the Firebug for the first time on the last flight, so I’d have noticed.
Hell, yeah! Which is more of a scarce resource - space in the baggage compartment, or space in the overhead bins?
And the whole weight/fuel cost excuse is bullshit. If it was about that, then they’d put your bags on a scale to decide how much to charge you. They’re just trying to raise prices without raising the sticker price, is all.
They could make life easier by simply enforcing their own carry-on limits. Every single flight i’ve taken over the last ten years has had dozens of people with too many bags or excessively large bags, and for the most part the airline staff do nothing about it.
What’s more, a high proportion of these people are also the sort of assholes who apparently don’t give a shit about the comfort of other people. Instead of putting their bags in wheels first, they put them in sideways in a way that takes up as much space as possible. Sometimes they cram their bags into the bins above row 5 or 6, then walk back to their own seats in row 16 or 23, leaving the people near the front of the plane with no room for their luggage.
Basically, if your suitcase won’t fit in the overhead bins wheels first, it needs to be checked, and airlines should enforce the rule. Not only would it make life more pleasant for those of us who manage to board with a single small bag, but it would speed up the whole boarding and deplaning process.
Well, leaving aside the weight/fuel issue, i’m not sure what the problem is with the airlines setting up a pricing structure that charges people for the services they use.
The whole thing works both ways. Sure, the airlines are doing what they can to claw back revenue, but part of the reason for that is that the flying public has made clear that, when booking flights, they will grab the cheapest sticker price available and worry about the other stuff later. Customers complain about the decline of services (food on flights, blankets, headphones, etc.), and about the airlines’ nickel-and-dime policies, but customers’ behavior in selecting flights has, at least in part, been responsible for the newer pricing models.
Also, while they have been largely responsible for many of their own problems, the fact is that quite a few of the airlines need to increase their revenues because they’re struggling. All 5 of the big legacy carriers lost money last year, from $205 million for US airways up to $1.5 billion for American. And that was a good year compared to 2008. The four biggest US airlines that made money were smaller or younger companies, including well-known budget carriers AirTran, Southwest, and JetBlue. Alaska, a smaller legacy carrier, was the other.
On the one hand we might look at Southwest’s presence on the moneymaking list and say, “Hey, they don’t charge for bags. Doesn’t that show that charging for baggage isn’t the answer?” Similarly, JetBlue doesn’t charge for the first bag either. But the other profitable airlines, Alaska and AirTran, do charge. Also, as this thread has revealed, the budget carriers do have other policies that some travelers don’t like, and that lead to some people avoiding those airlines.
The things is that much of the traveling public has come to expect Southwest-level prices, but old-style legacy-carrier levels of service. People complain about the price of flying, and do everything possible to get the cheapest possible flight, and then whine when their $300 cross-country return ticket doesn’t include every single little perk that they got when they flew back in 1993.
On the one hand, it’s sort of sad that air travel, particularly in its domestic incarnation, has lost so much of its romance and luxury and luster. On the other hand, it’s about as cheap as it’s ever been to get from Boston to LA, or Chicago to Miami, or Austin to Baltimore. My wife flew to San Francisco and back last month for $45 each way (total of about $115 including taxes). The taxi ride from the airport to her mother’s place costs about the same as the plane flight from San Diego to San Francisco.
I don’t really like making posts like this, because the airlines often act like jackasses, and i’m not a big defender of all of their policies. But i just don’t see the whole pay-for-what-you-use pricing system as especially offensive.
Good post mhendo, I agree. 20 years ago around trip New York to Lax was around $300. How much is it today? Around $300 with advance purchase. What else has gotten cheaper?
First, bag charges are clearly a big profit center for the airlines, so it is a little more than just charging for services used. I wonder how much extra cost comes from late flights due to overhead bin problems - but to a certain extent they were there before the charges because people didn’t trust the airlines with luggage.
The other thing is that these charges are not transparent, so people making decisions on price alone may not discover the true cost of the flight until well into the booking process - especially a problem when you are working with travel sites. The Times reports that travel managers at companies are having a big problem with not being able to predict the true cost of air travel due to extra charges - bags, food, seats, whatever. I think people would be much happier if these charges were given up front, which is perfectly possible.
Clearly not everyone is going to like every airline - the super frequent flier found in first class with platinum levels and membership in the lounges is not going to be a Southwest fan. But Southwest management has made it an explicit policy to not nickel and dime travelers, and it appears to be working. They were smart with oil prices, for a while, and have lower base costs, but the legacy airlines seem to be trying to make up the gap with service cuts.
We are getting legacy prices with Southwest levels of service. Ten years ago there was a fairly big difference between service on Southwest and legacy airlines; today I see little difference, assuming I’m not in first class for some reason. Let’s also not forget that Southwest has a simple, rational, and understandable fare structure.
I’m not offended by businesses trying to make money - I’ll just take my business elsewhere. The airline fee structure is very similar to upscale hotels which charge you resort fees even if you have no intention of using the spa or the tennis courts. Is it an accident that the probability of paying a fee for Internet access is directly proportional to the price of your room? When the actual price you pay for travel is what shows up in fare comparisons, it will be interesting to see what happens to market share.
I never said that they weren’t making a profit from the bag charges. What i said was that i have no problem with a pricing model that charges the customer for the particular service they use. I never said that the charge should simply be an at-cost charge; i have no problem, in general, with businesses making some profit from the services they provide. If you take your computer to be fixed, do you expect the cost of the repair to reflect only the cost incurred by the repair shop? Or are they allowed to actually make some money on the transaction?
I’m sure that a $25 bag fee does give the airline some profit, but the reason they have gone this route is precisely that customer expectations and preferences have forced down the price of the tickets themselves. Customers and competition have driven down the price of tickets, and even with the baggage fees many airlines still ran at a loss last year.
I’m not crying for them. Some of them were on the verge of folding 10 years ago, and were saved by government money in the wake of 9/11. That bailout effectively saved some airlines that should have gone under. But you can hardly blame a corporation that is bleeding money for looking at new ways to generate revenue.
I don’t know, but one thing that has helped Southwest’s profitability is their quick turnaround times. They have so many routes that, if they added a half hour to each turnaround, it would require them to spend hundreds of millions more on planes in order to service the same number of routes and passengers.
See, i don’t really blame the airlines for what information i get and don’t get from third-party travel sites. I’ve booked flights on Orbitz and Travelocity in the past couple of years, and they make very clear on those sites how much the price of the ticket alone is, how much the ticket plus taxes and fees costs, and they also make very clear that the ticket prices do not include baggage handling charges.
Conversely, if i go to the airline sites, like United.com, they have their baggage fees pretty clearly listed on their site. Also, with all the brouhaha over the past year or so regarding baggage fees, it’s not likely that someone planning to fly is going to be unaware of the issue. Furthermore, plenty of travel sites, including sites like Travelocity, actually provide easy-to-use tables that allow you to compare baggage fees among airlines.
Really, if someone can’t work this stuff out, they probably need to step away from the computer and hire a travel agent to sort things out for them.
You mean, i can work this stuff out for myself, but a travel manager, who is actually paid to do this shit, can’t figure it out? Jesus, we’re not talking rocket science here. I reckon that, if i were a travel manager, i could put together, with no more than a few hours work, a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet or table that would allow me to incorporate the policies of the major carriers and determine the cost of flying.
Not only that, but for the business people who actually use Business Class and/or who have good Frequent Flyer status (United Premier, etc.), many of the fees and charges that get stacked onto us economy drones don’t even apply.
I’m not denying that Southwest’s policies have worked for the airline. Their second-quarter profit this year is up over 30% compared to last year, and this in a period when they are not benefiting from fuel-hedging the way they were a few years ago.
Nor am i saying that the legacy carriers’ new policies necessarily give the best value all the time. Over the past few years, i’ve flown Southwest a couple of times because they have indeed been the best option. But i’ve also flown United and American and Frontier because, on a few occasions, paying $25 each way for my checked bag on those carriers was still cheaper than the total Southwest fare for the same trip, and i had the added benefit of an assigned seat and (in the case of United) adding miles to my FF tally.
My point is simply that i don’t see anything inherently worse in a pricing structure that charges incrementally based on services used. Hell, the baggage and other “nickel and dime” fees that some airlines charge are, in my opinion, far more transparent and predictable than the ticket prices themselves. When we were buying my wife’s ticket for SAN-SFO-SAN a couple of months ago, the price for the exact same itinerary bounced around by about 25-30% over the course of a few days. She almost booked on a day when the fare was about $55 each way, but didn’t. Then it went up to $79, and we thought we had missed out. And then, a couple of days later, it was back down to $45.
I understand why this happens, and i know that the airlines use complex algorithms to work out optimum prices at any given time. They do this is order to maximize their profit. I’m just not sure why i should be more or less annoyed by these price fluctuations than by baggage charges, because both serve the exact same purpose: to maximize company revenue.
I agree that there’s often not much difference. But, in my experience, neither is the pricing. For the most part, our plane ticket purchases, at least for domestic travel, are based almost exclusively on price. Sure, we avoid flights with multiple layovers where possible, but for the most part we’re focused on the cost. And, as i suggested above, in ten years of flying within the United States, there have been plenty of times when i was able to get a pre-assigned seat on a legacy carrier for less (sometimes considerably less) than on Southwest. And this has happened even in the era of checked luggage fees.
As for Southwest’s “simple, rational, and understandable fare structure,” i point you to my example above. Yes, they have a simple and rational structure in terms of different tiers of fare (Business Select; Anytime; Wanna Get Away; etc.), but their fares seem just as prone to fluctuations based on timing and demand as most other airlines.
If you take your business elsewhere every time you feel they are trying to “make money,” it appears that you are, in fact, offended by the idea.
Huh?
I think you have you argument ass-about. It seems to me that your analogy here would apply directly to the no-fee airlines like Southwest. After all, Southwest charges everyone the same, whether they want to check bags or not. United, on the other hand, charges for checked bags, meaning that those who travel only with cabin luggage pay less than those who have lugage to check.
Isn’t United’s a-la-carte system actually more reasonable, in principle? And isn’t Southwest’s more characteristic of a company that “charge[s] you resort fees even if you have no intention of using the spa or the tennis courts.” Because remember, Southwest have incorporated the cost of checking bags into their tickets, so everyone pays it, whether or not they check a bag.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but it’s my impression that most people who are extremely price sensitive about lodging (i.e. those who look at price first and quality later) aren’t likely to be staying at the kind of places that charge resort fees, make you pay for Internet, etc. For most who do stay at those places, quite frankly the fees are not that big of a deal. Would I rather not pay them? Sure. But as a percentage of the total cost of my trip, they tend to be a drop in the bucket. When the choice is between staying somewhere nice and having to pay extra for parking, wifi and a resort fee vs. staying somewhere less nice with no fees, I’ll pick the nice place every time. As fees have been added on over the years, I view them exactly the same as I’d view an increase in the basic room rate: if the total cost is acceptable, I book, if it’s not, I don’t.
