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Paying by the kg, whether kg of flesh/fat or kg of luggage, wouldn't be absurd. The kg of fat might be a bit cheaper, though: you need luggage crew to haul lugg
by fab13n 15y ago
Paying by the kg, whether kg of flesh/fat or kg of luggage, wouldn't be absurd. The kg of fat might be a bit cheaper, though: you need luggage crew to haul luggage, but most haul themselves autonomously.
A reason to impose penalty on luggage weight is that it affects what people bring aboard: penalties might entice you to leave some luggage at home; they won't entice you to leave your rolls of fat on the ground.
But companies won't start selling airfares by the kg: for it to be workable, you'd need a clear pricing scheme, and that's not in their best interest.
- vacri 15y agoIt's not the pricing scheme, it's the invasion of privacy that people will arc up about. Someone who is sensitive about their weight - and there are a lot of them - will be very difficult to manage in this situation.
- fab13n 15y agoYou mean, the privacy of those people who will be scanned and groped by TSA thugs minutes after they've checked their luggage in? It seems that people are ready to give up the last bit of dignity as soon as they enter an airport; if a company could offer a substantial discount in exchange for paying by the kg, many people would cope with it. Not everyone, but enough people to sustain an airline company. The reason why it won't happen is because their pricing scheme is already optimized to extract the last dime each traveler is willing to pay. Introducing a weight variable would mess that system up.
- vacri 15y agoThe article is from Melbourne, Australia. We don't have scanners or pat-downs. But anyway, I used to work in a call centre doing anonymous cold-calling social surveys for government. One survey had a section on sexual abuse and rape - and a few of us found it odd that some respondants would open up their private lives answering these questions, sometimes in a fair amount of detail, but still balk at the standard demographic section at the end where they are asked their income bracket. Some magic numbers are more significant than others.
- mooism2 15y agoMore than that: the airlines charge what they think people will pay. There's no reason to suppose that heavier people are willing to pay more than lighter people are (beyond children being light and poor).