6 ms·

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. T

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another. This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.

AtlanticThird 1y ago
I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to
- rimunroe 1y ago
  Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes. My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly. Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip. The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole. Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
  - tveyben 1y ago
    Do kids have to fly…???
    - scruple 1y ago
      No one does, so what's your point?
      - rimunroe 1y ago
        A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
    - ASinclair 1y ago
      Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.
    - hiroantag 1y ago
      What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.
- mcaravey 1y ago
  I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers. I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that. All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.
  - euleriancon 1y ago
    This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.
    - unglaublich 1y ago
      Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with. Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.
      - mothballed 1y ago
        Easy solution, just charge more for a child than for an adult, no fees needed.
- sweetheart 1y ago
  I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
- floatrock 1y ago
  What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together. What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience. What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human. And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.
  - scruple 1y ago
    > What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together. And charging parents paying extra so families can sit together is just an easy target.
    - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      They don’t charge “parents extra”. They charge everyone extra for choosing a seat.
- wat10000 1y ago
  There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you. Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use. If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.
  - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
    Okay, in that case the airlines shouldn’t allow people to book a fare where you can’t choose your seat if you are flying with a kid - problem solved.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      Right, that's my third paragraph.
- afavour 1y ago
  They are meaningfully different scenarios, though. If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained. If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child. I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.
  - baq 1y ago
    At which point a homo sapiens specimen becomes a homo economicus?
- doktrin 1y ago
  > I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.
itopaloglu83 1y ago
Asking families if their teenager could be seated separately is one thing, but knowing the airlines, they might as well start seating the toddlers in the overhead luggage compartments.
- bthrn 1y ago
  The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Don't forget that some airlines seriously looked at standing "seats" for short hop flights.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    The Fifth Element solution!
  - mrinterweb 1y ago
    You and I should talk :) I've been thinking of this ever since seeing the movie "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone". He uses a sleeping gas on his audience packs them into a moving truck and "magically" transports his audience to a new location. Tada! Basically same idea, but substitute moving truck with jet.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
    - nostrademons 1y ago
      So then just pile them up without knocking them out.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
proggy 1y ago
This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  I usually filter out all Basic Economy fares from my search and only look at the next tier up, where you can get seat selection at time of booking. I just figure it's a product that doesn't work for my family.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Think of the inverse, someone who doesn’t care about where they sit save money. On the other hand, I never understood this obsession with grown people acting like it’s the end of the world if they don’t sit together. My wife and I fly a lot together - over a dozen trips this year - and she flies more frequently by herself. We both prefer window seats. We hardly ever sit together unless we can get 2 seats next to us by ourselves like on larger planes with a 3-2-3 combination or exit row seats in main.
  - jcotton42 1y ago
    In this particular case, it lets the parents trade childcare responsibilities back and forth during the flight, which can be a serious boon on a long flight or if one of them starts feeling unwell.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  I have to pay more to select the exact seats I want on a plane, so why shouldn't you?
  - egonschiele 1y ago
    Parents want to sit next to their kids Let's assume this for sake of argument that people don't want to sit next to other people's kids. So here's a situation no one wants. But parents will be the ones who have to pay. New legislation is saying that parents are the one who should pay for this. You make a fair point that making everyone pay to select the exact seat they want, would just be treating everyone the same way. What I'm saying is, if you do it this way, you're now leaving the decision up to the parents. And some parents will choose not to pay. When that happens – because it will happen – I don't want to hear people complaining about having to sit next to other people's kids. Everyone was treated equally, a choice was given, a choice was made. The other option is, we say as a society that here is a situation nobody wants, we all see that, so we're all going to collectively agree to set things up in the parents' favor a little bit, thus doing something nice, creating an outcome that is better for everyone, but at the cost that some parent seating gets subsidised by others on the plane. Just laying out the options. Classic individualist thinking will say, I don't want the government to decide for me that I should subsidize. And thus some people will end up sitting next to somebody's crying 2 year old.
duxup 1y ago
It drives me crazy that airlines are allowed to book tickets for families who have to sit together ... but then they have to sort it out at the gate. It's just a big pain for everyone.

AtlanticThird 1y ago

I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

rimunroe 1y ago
Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes. My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly. Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip. The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole. Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
- tveyben 1y ago
  Do kids have to fly…???
  - scruple 1y ago
    No one does, so what's your point?
    - rimunroe 1y ago
      A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
  - ASinclair 1y ago
    Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.
  - hiroantag 1y ago
    What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.
mcaravey 1y ago
I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers. I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that. All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.
- euleriancon 1y ago
  This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.
  - unglaublich 1y ago
    Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with. Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Easy solution, just charge more for a child than for an adult, no fees needed.
sweetheart 1y ago
I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)
floatrock 1y ago
What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together. What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience. What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human. And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.
- scruple 1y ago
  > What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together. And charging parents paying extra so families can sit together is just an easy target.
  - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
    They don’t charge “parents extra”. They charge everyone extra for choosing a seat.
wat10000 1y ago
There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you. Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use. If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.
- raw_anon_1111 1y ago
  Okay, in that case the airlines shouldn’t allow people to book a fare where you can’t choose your seat if you are flying with a kid - problem solved.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Right, that's my third paragraph.
afavour 1y ago
They are meaningfully different scenarios, though. If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained. If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child. I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.
- baq 1y ago
  At which point a homo sapiens specimen becomes a homo economicus?
doktrin 1y ago
> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.

itopaloglu83 1y ago

Asking families if their teenager could be seated separately is one thing, but knowing the airlines, they might as well start seating the toddlers in the overhead luggage compartments.

bthrn 1y ago
The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Don't forget that some airlines seriously looked at standing "seats" for short hop flights.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  The Fifth Element solution!
- mrinterweb 1y ago
  You and I should talk :) I've been thinking of this ever since seeing the movie "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone". He uses a sleeping gas on his audience packs them into a moving truck and "magically" transports his audience to a new location. Tada! Basically same idea, but substitute moving truck with jet.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  Knocking someone out safely isn't cheap. There's a reason anesthesiologists are so highly paid. Just ask the hostages from Dubrovka Theater [0] how improvising an anesthetic gas can go (spoiler: you'll need a medium/ouija board). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    So then just pile them up without knocking them out.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

proggy 1y ago

This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.

nostrademons 1y ago
I usually filter out all Basic Economy fares from my search and only look at the next tier up, where you can get seat selection at time of booking. I just figure it's a product that doesn't work for my family.
scarface_74 1y ago
Think of the inverse, someone who doesn’t care about where they sit save money. On the other hand, I never understood this obsession with grown people acting like it’s the end of the world if they don’t sit together. My wife and I fly a lot together - over a dozen trips this year - and she flies more frequently by herself. We both prefer window seats. We hardly ever sit together unless we can get 2 seats next to us by ourselves like on larger planes with a 3-2-3 combination or exit row seats in main.
- jcotton42 1y ago
  In this particular case, it lets the parents trade childcare responsibilities back and forth during the flight, which can be a serious boon on a long flight or if one of them starts feeling unwell.
terminalshort 1y ago
I have to pay more to select the exact seats I want on a plane, so why shouldn't you?
- egonschiele 1y ago
  Parents want to sit next to their kids Let's assume this for sake of argument that people don't want to sit next to other people's kids. So here's a situation no one wants. But parents will be the ones who have to pay. New legislation is saying that parents are the one who should pay for this. You make a fair point that making everyone pay to select the exact seat they want, would just be treating everyone the same way. What I'm saying is, if you do it this way, you're now leaving the decision up to the parents. And some parents will choose not to pay. When that happens – because it will happen – I don't want to hear people complaining about having to sit next to other people's kids. Everyone was treated equally, a choice was given, a choice was made. The other option is, we say as a society that here is a situation nobody wants, we all see that, so we're all going to collectively agree to set things up in the parents' favor a little bit, thus doing something nice, creating an outcome that is better for everyone, but at the cost that some parent seating gets subsidised by others on the plane. Just laying out the options. Classic individualist thinking will say, I don't want the government to decide for me that I should subsidize. And thus some people will end up sitting next to somebody's crying 2 year old.

duxup 1y ago

It drives me crazy that airlines are allowed to book tickets for families who have to sit together ... but then they have to sort it out at the gate. It's just a big pain for everyone.