Here are the rates for flying from Milwaukee to St. Louis.
The cheapest ticket is $105 one way. If you want to get priority boarding the Business Select option is $235. If you really want to make sure you get your choice of seat the Early Bird check in option is an additional $25 per person one way.
So to insure getting a decent seat and getting them together the $105 fare is now $260 each. Now multiply that by the number of people you’re traveling with and add a return trip with the same factors and several hundred dollars more are being spent.
We used it when we went to Punta Cana last November. On the flight down we were not able to sit together. If enough people use it it kind of defeats it’s purpose.
What, they just raised the EarlyBird rate? It was $12.50 per person one way last time I flew with them in November and that’s still what’s posted at their webpage. That may be what **Renee **was referring to – but then again that is not truly priority seating. The EarlyBird system checks you in ahead of the regular cattle call but AFTER the people with the real priority (full fare business and families with children). And yes, it can be swamped.
ETA: I see you say Punta Cana – it may be that domestic is still $12.50 per person per direction and international isn’t. Or there may be something else at work.
There is a huge market for people who are, traditionally, smaller than those of the rest of the world.
I do hope the seat attachment hardware is such that a variety of seat configurations are easily interchanged.
p.s. - find the local general aviation airport and look up the Cessna 150/152. It is the classic high-wing trainer (no, Cessna did NOT re-start production of the little one) - the cabin is 36" across.
The usual explanation of this space: “You wear each other’s clothes”.
I’ll have to check my CC statement. Possible I doubled it in my head because there were 2 of us. Didn’t do any good on the flight down. By the time we got on board there were no 2 seats together. Grrr
Then, for some reason I couldn’t get Early Bird for the flight back. The system wouldn’t let me book it. We were the second group boarded and got to sit on the first seats at the front…together! Without EB. Odd.
Ironic, isn’t it, that as the human race moves forward genetically, becoming bigger and taller as it gets healthier, airplane seats get smaller and smaller.
Though there’s a detail that nobody here seems to have picked up on. According to the article in the OP, the seat width is not changing; the A380 seats are already only 18" wide, so anyone who is able to fin in them today will fit just as well tomorrow. The change is to the cabin itself, which will apparently be made 18" wider (or else the aisles will be shrunk by 9" each, or some combination of the two).
In any case, I’m guessing that this change is intended primarily for the Asian market, where the increased capacity is most needed, and where people seem less inclined, from a cultural standpoint, to complain about being crowded together.
I suspect – very, very strongly – that they made the aisles narrower. That would be far easier & cheaper than re-engineering the aircraft to make the cabin wider.
Perhaps the Airbus seats were only 18" before; it’s been a few years since the last time I flew, but I certainly don’t remember being wider than my seat.
The petite seats aren’t that big of deal on real short flights. We fly a lot to St. louis and Minneapolis. 1 hour and done. Barely get your soda finished.
But a cross country or international flight? Blah! I flew coach to Aisa once. It was awful. Now with the seats narrower and more people? Ugh!!!
mrAru and I have pretty much decided that at this time in our lives, I might as well just figure on depending on Cunard for my Atlantic Ocean crossings … if I am going to have to spend big bucks to get to and from Europe in something other than cattle class, I might as well have really spiff conditions to do so. At this point in time, it is looking like business class air travel and ‘cattle class’ boat travel are going to intersect in price. Cunard’s generic cattle class inside stateroom is running $1099 per person each way [east to west, west to east] and I can state that not only is it going to be more comfortable, I bet the food is better as well
What boarding assignments did you get on the first leg? With EB, or even being sure to get my boarding pass exactly 24 hours before, I’ve always been able to sit with an empty middle seat next to me - at the start. It usually gets filled.
The only reason I can imagine there being a problem (unless they don’t have international stuff worked out yet) if this flight is the second leg for most people. Since you get boarding passes for both legs at once, you get the second one more than 24 hours before the flight.
BTW while they reserve the first set of boarding slots for business class, I’ve seldom seen them all used.
Yes, but it will still suck worse for the cattle. The aisles will be narrower, meaning more difficulty in boarding, more congestion, and more arms and serving carts banging into your elbows if you’re in an aisle seat. A greater percentage (5/11 versus 4/10) of seats will be middle seats. And, some poor sap (no doubt me) will get the exquisite joy of being in a double-middle seat, with two fragrant, oversized bodies on each side.
