7 ms·
It's not that there are people willing to sit in smaller seats. It's that airlines don't tell you how badly cramped your seat is going to be, you don't think a
by gruturo 9y ago
It's not that there are people willing to sit in smaller seats.
It's that airlines don't tell you how badly cramped your seat is going to be, you don't think about it when buying, and people have a short memory unless the experience was so brutally bad that it fixes itself in your memory.
They should, at the very least, be forced to disclose the seat pitch on every flight, so people can make an informed decision - and then, yes, you can let the market decide.
At the moment there's no reward for offering decent seats, the airlines doing so are effectively at a competitive disadvantage compared to the ones which don't. This needs to change.
- prostoalex 9y agoBooking directly through the airline usually allows for some sort of seat discrimination. But as most flights are booked through various aggregators, the strategy that seems to work is to offer a dirt-cheap basic ticket, and then hope to upsell the customer on premium seating at check-in time. Only recently have aggregators started disclosing bag charges, which could be significant, especially with low-cost airlines (WOW, Norwegian, AirBerlin) outcompeting everyone else on basic ticket fare and appearing high in the results.
- Gargoyle 9y agoIf the airlines offering decent seats don't have a competitive advantage, that's either because A) they're not marketing it very well, or B) people don't really care.