As someone who's not overweight I don't think I would care. What I really wish they'd charge for is overhead luggage. I wish they'd charge so much that no one bothers with it.
Is there any reason or are you just generally a sadist?
Overhead luggage is the only place you can take anything fragile. You have no control over how your checked baggage is handled and anything you have to take with you into the cramped seating space will get squished.
One reason that I would value is that it would speed up boarding and deplaning. As you correctly point out, the prevailing overhead luggage system provides a benefit to some travelers, potentially to the detriment of others. It's a tradeoff.
I seriously doubt it would make much difference for deplaning - people already stand in the isle with their luggage out of the compartment long before the doors open.
For boarding it might speed things up but often boarding is done before all checked luggage is loaded so it will probably not let you take off faster either.
I agree that it wouldn't cause the doors to open any sooner for deplaning, but once they did, people could just ... leave. The people standing in the aisle with their luggage out of the compartment are the ones who started in the aisle seats. People in the other seats need to get out, reach up, pull down, get organized. Sometimes they have to salmon their way back from their actual seat to the compartment several rows behind them because that's where they had to stow their carry-on because the people seated in row 30 put their bag over row 16 when they boarded[1].
Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.
What if larger sizes of clothes were priced higher, since they use more material? I wear a small in almost every case so wouldn't affect me, but man it'd be nerve wracking for a lot of Americans.
In most cases the cost of fabric itself is a pretty minor part of the garment price- you're paying for someone to design the clothes, assemble them, ship them, and operate a store that sells them, and those costs are pretty much the same for small and large sizes. Adjusting the price based on the amount of fabric used would probably end up being a dollar or so for the things most people wear on a daily basis.
Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
Are you at all concerned the airlines will remove the air from the cabin if you try this, just to emphasize that you’re not going to get a refund this way?
Anyway I’ll be across the aisle with hydrogen balloons paying less than you either way. Enjoy your flight!
Mass and volume both count, in an aircraft, don't they? And many oversize humans present logistical and safety challenges:
- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.
- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom
- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow
- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"
- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself
Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.
Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
Speaking as a fat person, air travel is horrible and I'll happily drive a couple thousand miles to avoid flying.
On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
I don't particularly want to make life choices based on what's most economically efficient for airlines, but you do you I guess. And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
Regardless of what size you believe everyone should be, the airlines have to deal with the size that people actually are. They have made the choice to size their seats in a way that causes this problem. They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together. And they do so with the knowledge that judgemental assholes will just blame the fatties instead of them.
But keep playing their game, you appear to be good at it.
The airlines are dealing with the size people are by, in your example, preventing those oversized for their chosen seat from negatively impacting others.
> And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
It literally is. No matter the genetic predisposition, you need a caloric surplus to get fat.
> They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together.
They do provide bigger seats at a higher price point though. You have chosen not to make use of them and then blame the airline. If you are big enough that sitting next to someone your own size causes you discomfort then you would be encroaching the space of someone smaller sitting next to you. That wouldn't be fair to them.
I mean, it is kind of optimal. Fat guys will experience constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact in a flight anyway, so placing them together reduces the total constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact experienced.
A fat guy next to a skinny person doesn't experience skin-on-skin contact. Which is why I do everything I can to get an aisle seat and hope the middle seat is empty or has a skinny person in it.
Ask the airline, they're the ones that choose narrower seats than the manufacturer's recommendations. I assume this was a budget flight or one of the airlines like American Eagle that service smaller airports?
Narrowing them further can allow even more people to fit, uncomfortably. The fact that you have any space at all is because larger people have to fit somewhere.
No business class on the Pituffik rotator. The only other option is flying through Copenhagen (good luck getting the company to pay for that) or sitting in a jump seat on a C130 with your shins against the cargo.
You're going to end up sitting next to a stranger anyway if you're flying alone. Nobody says you have to become friends, but I wouldn't mind having in common with my seatmate that we're both the kind of people who don't take the standard option at face value.
If anything, booking together with a stranger would allow you to leave an empty seat between you which is less likely to be filled than if you leave two empty seats next to you.
And the service could even be set up to give you some choice over the stranger (at the expense of less matches) like setting a maximum weight.
Any time I do select a seat in advance, I try to pick my window seat where someone already has the aisle one. It works surprisingly often to get an empty seat in the row!
I've always thought there's a difference between who you book with and who's on your itinerary. Very rarely do I say I'm traveling with anyone unless we're staying in the same room. I guess these fares do specifically state that, but I have a very hard time imagining anyone at the gate would care, they're typically doing the bare minimum as they should.
A company can figure out the premium and just average it out across the pax who book thru them. Further they could risk-manage no-shows or other bad behaviour based on ratings and feedback. It's just wasting everybody's time to go thru intermediaries.
Because they may change their plans. They could be a no-show (which will affect your return flight). They could call and change the flight without your knowledge. They could add extras to the trip and charge it to your card.
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
Some sort of service that sat on top of bookings would have its own set of terms and conditions that you agree to, which would at least disincentivize them from acting against your interest.
I can foresee that backfiring when you miss your connection and end up having to stay somewhere unexpected overnight, and then the airline will only pay for one room for both of you.
Traveling together does not imply that you're rooming together. It's probably a bit of a fight with the airline to get them to pay for it, but then everything is a bit of a fight with the Airline.
But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)