This sounds like a good idea as I have only been to one Eiffel Tower.
Knowing some ones age is definitely an invasion of privacy.
Kids on planes have never bothered me, even The Perma-Screaming Baby when I didn’t have kids. As long as everyone involved is doing their best, which they usually are, I’m not bothered.
I could work with separate flights for people who are just plain jerks, though. The family who need to have shouted conversations across the entire plane for the entire flight, and the eight-year-old seat-kicker and his dad who doesn’t do a thing to stop him, and the guy with the volume turned up loud on his tablet and no earphones, and the woman with a carry-on bag the size of a bison. All these people should be tagged on some database, and after the second offence they should have to pay a supplement and go on the Jerk Flight.
This. I would pay more for a flight that has limitations on carry-on baggage. I would even pay more for a flight that has priority seating for peoole with no carry-on luggage (or, compromise, if your carry-on can fit under the seat.) I would even pay extra if the policy was extended to off-boarding as well.
Nothing destroys the absolute tranquility and peacefulness of air travel like a crying baby…in other words, no, I would not pay extra. Flying is a mess, and babies are almost a non-issue.
We recently flew a cheapo airline to Florida, and there was a baby that…well…crying is a not a good enough term. More like demonically possessed. Within the screaming, I swear I could make out obscenities and Satanic curses. The people around me didn’t seem to care and most thought it was funny. After sitting on the ground for about 2 hours, they cancelled the flight due to mechanical reasons…that’s when the real fun began.
Amen, sister.
Different types of flights means higher ticket prices. No thanks.
I really can’t think of any serious problems I’ve had with children on flights and I don’t understand the “Damn kids on planes” complaint; it’s as if those people live in a different universe than the one I inhabit, and I’ve taken hundreds of flights so my data sample is not a small one. All the problematic passengers I’ve had to suffer through, not that there were many, were adults. Sattua’s point about people carrying on luggage far too large to be carryon is bang on. That’s literally one hundred times more of an irritation to my flying experience than children are.
If it were economically viable, I’m sure airlines would already be doing it - much as they now have the “economy plus” seats (which I usually spring for).
One of the best flights I ever took was one of those 12-hour marathons across the Pacific when my son was about 2 years old. In those days my husband’s employer paid for business class so we had great seats. Oddly, the flight was virtually empty except for us and another couple with children, also in business class. So we used the business class cabin as the “quiet place” and assigned one parent to oversee economy class - completely devoid of passengers - as the “playground” where our children could run up and down the aisles to their hearts content.
I can’t imagine the airline made any profit on that flight, but it was memorably wonderful
I’d pay extra to equip flight attendents with Tasers. You get one warning, then ZAP!
A carrier banning children from all flights might not be illegal discrimination (which is I assume what you’re talking about). Children are not a protected class. There are some laws that deal with age-discrimination, but I believe they only cover discriminating against old people (young people do not have effective lobbyists). And the courts have decided many times that we have no right to fly on an airplane.
That said, I find the idea incredibly distasteful. I would refuse to patronize any airline that had such a policy, and I expect that others would too.
I’m guessing that social resistance to this is part of the reason such flights are not offered. The other part is that it’s economically inefficient. Even if there are people who would pay extra for such a flight, there probably aren’t enough to make up for the awkward scheduling and routing problems. Most people buy airline tickets based only on cost, and just having these flights would make an airlines other flights less efficient to the point that they would have trouble competing on cost. The average profit margin in the airline industry is approximately 0, so there’s little room for this kind of maneuver.
It’s also possible that to effectively do this, the entire carrier would have to be kid-only, since there may be regulations about how people who get bumped from their flights are accommodated. It’s one thing to schedule a flight with no kids, but what do you do if a previous kid-allowed flight gets cancelled and you have to reroute people?
I’ve never had a kid insist on reclining into my lap for a full three hours. I’ve never had a kid take off her shoes and scratch the soles of her feet on the chair arm across the aisle on a ERJ-145. (that makes it a lot closer to my nose than the floor where your feet belong). I’ve never had a kid get drunk and tel the same story from Dallas to KC. I’ve never had a kid tell me how important he is and how the company couldn’t run without him. I’ve never seen a kid whip out his cell phone the minute we land and start a loud “look at me! I’m so important!” business call at the top of his voice.
Where’s the no Blowhard flight or the Respecter of Boundries flight? If I’ve got to sit elbow to elbow with someone for three hours, please let it be a teenager! They want to be ignored and left alone and so do I. I can’t really hear conversations in planes and I’d rather not even try.
You absolutely can have a flight that contains none of your pet peeves, whatever they may be. They cost about $1000/hour. Spirit Airlines (gah :eek:) costs about $30/hour.
Now that you understand the cost / price equation you can decide if you’re ready for child-, phone-, carryon-, or fat- free flying.
Doing anything as inexpensively as possible means sacrificing disproportionately for that last buck in your pocket.
The stuff at the dollar store is far crappier than the stuff sold at K-Mart. Which is only slightly crappier than the stuff sold at Target.
It’s your money, but it’s also your blood pressure. And your knees. The mainstream carriers don’t always deliver a good product on every flight. But at least it’s possible (probable?) for it to be a good product.
The aerial dollar store cannot fail to disappoint in every dimension except (maybe) price.
Would it come with Playboy Bunnies?
There was this (briefly): Hooters Air - Wikipedia
Y’all people who haven’t had to deal with an obnoxious kid on a flight are lucky. My wife a few years ago sat next to this out-of-control kid who actually bit her.
Twice.
I tell you what, my daughter got in SO MUCH TROUBLE for that one.
For me, it’s kind of the opposite. My misery meter only goes down so low before I’m just plain miserable, and flying is pretty much automatically going to bottom it out. So it doesn’t really matter to me if I’m achingly miserable or ridiculously miserable or absurdly miserable. It’s gonna suck either way, but I also know it’s only going to last so long before it’s all just a bad and usually quickly-forgotten memory. So when given the option between “a few miserable hours and more money in my pocket” or " a few miserable hours and less money", I’m going to go for the former.
Install a carryon measure box with scale at every airline baggage checkin. If your carryon is oversize and/or overweight, it must be checked. No exceptions. If you somehow manage to avoid baggage checkin, TSA should have a size restricter plate at the entrance to the required X-ray machine. If your carryon cannot pass through the restricter plate, you have to return to the airline baggage checkin desk and check your oversize carryon.
That should solve perhaps 90 percent of my personal flight complaints.
I think the OP has it backwards. People with screaming babies should cost extra and have that extra refunded to the other passengers. Carry-ons should cost extra, and refunded to those who didn’t have any. Should also be free to check luggage. Make a disruption to the boarding/disembarking process or during the flight? Fined and refunded to others.
Didn’t they used to have these? I remember seeing them and thinking they should be a overhead-compartment level. They’d not only have to fit, you have to be able to put it there.
I had the opposite experience on a flight once a couple of years ago. It was Southwest direct from Denver to Providence, RI and I was absolutely last in the boarding priority (Southwest only has first come, first served seating). I was positive that I was about to be trapped in the middle on a 4 hour flight between extremely large mouth breathers.
As the last of us boarded the plane, I noticed an actual aisle seat with a mother next to the window and a two year old in the middle. Everyone else passed it up like it didn’t even exist but I was all over that.
That was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I have daughters of my own and I made friends with the two year old easily. She was unobtrusive, smart and very sweet.
Even better than that, her mother was a Chinese-American and it may sound stereotypical but it is a fact. She had a veritable Chinese buffet packed under her seat still warm and homemade by her family in California (her originating point). We ate the hell out of that stuff all the way across the country. It could not have been a better experience if I was in first class for an airline that offers it.
I thought this thread would be about some kind of premium-priced Mile High Club.