If comfort is important to you, then you can use the steps I outlined to you, or search for flights on seatguru. Most flight search engines do a perfectly good job of displaying the information that is most important to the vast majority of consumers: cost and schedule.
To say it another way, I’m a frequent flier on United. It is to my advantage to fly United or its partner airlines in Star Alliance. There are a couple search engines that will help me select Star Alliance flights, but not all engines do that. But it is important to me to rack up those miles, which is probably not the case for the vast majority of fliers, so I take a few extra steps in choosing my flights. If extra legroom is as important to you as my flying on Star Alliance is to me, you can apply just a little bit more work and come away fully satisfied. I, on the other hand, don’t see any point in complaining that Travelocity and Orbitz don’t display alliance affiliation since I know that Kayak does. I just use Kayak and ignore the other sites.
So, the issue means a lot to you, but not enough to take 30 seconds to check seatguru? I’m 5’6" and never been particularly uncomfortable on a flight, and I still check seatguru for every flight.
It is not me that is the concern. It is not my problem that needs to be resolved. It is the general problem.
One of the themes of this thread is that airlines do not care about legroom in cattle class, because cattle class only cares about price and not space. The problem with that notion is that the information about space is not generally available when comparing prices online, so even if it was relevant to people, it is not something that they can consider. This leads to flight choices based on primarily on price, even if the difference is only slight. So, of course, because people only chose airlines based on price, there is no incentive for an airline to increase their legroom. It is a circle.
If they would make that information generally available when doing price comparisons among airlines, there would be a market. The information has to be available at the point where a choice is being considered among airlines/flights for it to be relevant.
I get what you are saying, but it should be pointed out that your complaint is about how travel websites display flights, not about the airlines failing to advertise their premium economy offers. United doesn’t control how Expedia displays its search results.
What’s more, what you are suggesting – that people would choose higher fares if they knew they were getting more room – seems to be counter to the pricing models that most major airlines are adopting. Most airlines have clearly adopted the strategy of showing the lowest possible fare, then upselling passengers for amenities.
For example, Ravenair advertises $199 round trip tickets to Los Angeles. Wow, you say, What a deal! You click through. Then you’re asked if you want to check a bag – well, yes, and that’s $35. Would you like to board first? Sure, but that’s another $10. Larger seat? No, $50 isn’t worth it… but $35 for an exit row seems ok. Oh, did we not mention that taxes weren’t included in that? Suddenly that ticket costs more like $300.
Spirit Airlines is the most notorious example of this, and they are a very profitable airline. The idea that you’re proposing – that offering higher, flat fee tickets for larger seats – sounds like a reasonable idea, but you have to square that with the overwhelming industry trend to offer low fares to lure people in, then charge them as much as they can in add-ons.
So, the options are that you are right and the CEOs of the largest multi-billion dollar travel corporations are all hideously misinformed about how to run and advertise your business; or the CEOs have figured a way to successfully drain the most cash they can from their customers and your business proposal has been tried but simply isn’t appealing to the average consumer. Honestly, my bet is on the latter.
My thoughts are the reclined position is the ‘normal’ position, just put upright for purposes of takeoffs and landings. As such it is part of the space allocation for the seat’s occupant to be reclined, using this device intrudes into this space (you are taking away the person’s space by preventing their seat from reclining). If one chooses to fly with their seat not reclined they are giving a bonus to the passenger behind them, as opposed to much of the thinking here that reclining is taking away space from the person behind as that space was never belonging to the person behind.
A solution however seems to be make the seat recline by moving the passenger’s seat forward instead of the backrest backwards. This way the person who wishes to recline would face any loss of leg room instead of the conventional situation.
I don’t get this at all. Unless you’re in first class, the seats don’t recline more than a few inches, and that’s at the top of the seat. At the fulcrum point, it doesn’t move at all, and if you’re sitting on a seat, your hips would be just above the fulcrum point, and unless you’re sticking your legs wildly up in the air, so would your knees. I can’t imagine there’s more than an inch of difference between an unreclined seat and a reclined seat at that point. It seems to me, if you’re such a giant that one inch is the difference between being perfectly happy and severe knee pain, you ought to buy a first class ticket.
What I would like is a device that stops the person behind me from banging into the back of the seat the whole flight.
My point is that demand for detailed seat information just isn’t there enough to make it worth the time to code it, as only a small number of people use it as a deciding factor.
I order groceries online. When I buy apples, I am given the variety and price per pound. I am not given the size, or a rating of their aroma, or the option to choose harder or softer ones. There is no reason why they couldn’t offer this information. I am sure they could handle my preference for rock-hard honeycrisps that are not too large and do not have an attached stem and smell strongly of peaches.
But they don’t offer that level of choice. They just let me choose the honeycrisp or the golden delicious. This is not because they hate me, it’s just because 99.999% of online shoppers are fine with just that information and it’s not with the time and added complexity to accommodate the .001% who will actually make buying decision based on the additional info.
You guys all have great ideas. But airlines aren’t going to implement them out of charity.
This. Unless you’re flying to someplace no one else wants to go, your flight is either at capacity or oversold most of the time now. The airlines are very good at trying to maximize revenue and have good calculations on the percentage of no shows for just about any contingency. I don’t do that number of segments, but most of my hops are transcon or international. I’ve noticed that in say, the last three years the airlines have really tightened up on inventory, and because of all the mergers, there’s less available capacity overall.
This actually makes sense from an economic standpoint, since it’s far cheaper to throw some travelers four hundred dollars for an involuntary bump than have an aircraft take off a third full.
BTW, there is an alternate solution for tall people or those with knee issues or who must work on their laptop. Book a seat immediately behind an exit row.
Just read the article, the inventor of the knee states that the airline is selling the space twice. Once for him to sit down and also for the person to recline.
So the answer is a class action lawsuit. I see enough lawyers flying, wonder why one hasn’t come up with this. They paid for their space but can’t use it because of the recliner in front of them. Sue for loss of space say 5% loss if someone reclines(just pulled the number out of the air) therefore want 5% back times millions of tickets. Problem solved. Airlines put in non reclining seats or take out a row or two and pass the cost on. People can still buy based on price it will just be a bit higher and others won’t have to worry about recliners. :dubious:
Remember you heard it hear first. 10% finders fee please.
You can’t always do that. My personal travel is usually with my two young daughters. It doesn’t matter what seats I pick, we always get rebooked to the last row of the plane where they put people with kids. I always joke about it and tell them ‘Now get to the back of the bus!’ because it is a real policy but one that is never advertised. I think I need to pull a Rosa Parks the next time we travel on a plane to get myself in the history books but somehow I don’t think that will work as well as I hope.
You haven’t paid for it before you get to look at the seats. Hitting back on your browser six times and re-entering your credit card info for a different flight on another airline takes, what, like 4 minutes? I understand you’re saying that you’d rather have that info up front, and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that.
But if more legroom isn’t worth 4 or 8 or even 12 additional minutes, not to mention something like 12% more money out of one’s pocket, it just can’t be called a priority for a customer, can it?
that statistic doesn’t represent what you think it does. The first thing an airline does when the plane density is low is to swap a smaller airplane onto the route. I couldn’t find much on passenger miles but Deltagained about 1% from 2012 to 2013.
I’m not following the point your trying to make. Domestic passenger miles went from 471.7 billion in 2002 to 540.6 billion in 2009 to 578.7 billion last year. During that time, passengers went from 551.9 million to 618.1 million to 645.6 million; and flights also got more crowded. Meanwhile, the number of flights went from 8.1 million to 8.8 million to 8.3 million.
So the number of passengers is up by 20%, the passenger-miles is up by the same, and flights are 15% more crowded, while the number of flights has t gone up that much. Why do you think these statistics mean that flights are less crowded? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
