First they were cold, now they’re exploitative.
UK minister says airlines used "exploitative algorithms" to split up families unless they paid extra
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Ah, you are clearly conditioned by modern airline seating practices.
TL-DR: These are not ‘leftover’ seats. This is what happens when you buy a ticket regardless of when you buy. These are also not ‘basic economy’ tickets. These are the only tickets offered.
Summary
Back in the bad old days when air travel was staggeringly expensive and air-hostesses unfailingly glamourous (because fired if not), airlines would ask you where you’d like to sit when you booked a ticket.
Then we got computers and still airlines would show you the available seats in your chosen price class and let you choose which ones you’d like. Much like theatres still do these days.
Now you book a ticket and the airline either doesn’t allocate you a seat at all so you have to scrum for it when you board or tells you where your seat is so they can charge you to change it if you don’t like where they’ve put you.
This is done regardless of how many seats have already been allocated when you book.
If airlines were splitting people up who were booking last minute and were genuinely offering the only available seats, that would be one thing.
The CAA report indicates that some airlines try to seat people booking together next to each other, others… do not. The level of people being split up if they don’t pay to be seated next to each other varies significantly by airline - and they don’t tell you in advance whether you will be sat next to each other if you don’t pay the extra.
The CAA report is here by the way if anyone is interested:
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Why should this be extra? Why not just assign them seats together. What about families who don’t have much money and need to travel by plane?
This is their children, though.
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You mean paying extra. To me, this is just another example of a company exploiting our expectations for what’s included in the price. Maybe the metallic color on your phone turns out to be plated plastic; Guinness sells you an 11.5-oz. bottle of beer; you order a “merino” sweater that is 50% acrylic. The company is profiting of the difference between what you though you were getting and what they felt like providing.
Often, our expectations are formed by previous purchases from other companies. So Ryanair and the rest of them are leeching off the business relationship that other companies paid to develop.
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I’m a recent, unfortunate traveler with RyanAir. This is not my first RA flight, and there are some major changes.
First, yes, they did randomly assign minor children seats away from family. Now, children under 12 must have a paid adult with them. All of us were assigned a middle seat randomly throughout the flight. There was no case in which anyone was assigned an aisle or window seat, even though, according to the website, they are of equal value.
Second, during the check-in process, you are supposed to be able to exchange your seat for another one of equal value. They have a color-coded seating chart. All of the cheap seats are supposed to be “0” (according to the screen capture I have from Tuesday). HOWEVER, when you go to move the seats, it would randomly charge me an additional 4-9 euro for the same “0$” seats. This extra cost was also applied to the paid seats.
Additionally, they demand that you provide a printed boarding pass, which you cannot get for your return flight UNLESS you purchase a “reserved seat.”
This is important – they do not call these UPGRADED SEATS – you are paying to RESERVE a particular seat. Upgrades are extra legroom, etc. – it has always been the case when we’ve purchased an airline ticket that we automatically had a reserved seat.
So yes, one should not be forced to pay additional money to sit together if the seats – according to the airline – are all of the same value.
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Also, having kids always makes everything more complicated and usually more expensive. Flights are a big drain on a young family’s budget.
Now if an airline was a bit smarter they’d offer discounts to families with children, then work hard to sell them flight insurance for the frequent ticket cancellations that occur with young kids. And quickly fill empty seats with standby tickets.
Don’t really have a problem with airlines charging more to select a specific seat, but think aisle or window preferred should be free (with the airline ideally trying to do its best to accommodate the majority of customers). Splitting children from their parents is inappropriate. Also always have wondered whether or not these efforts to make flying as inconvenient and unpleasant as possible actually results in greater profits for the airlines.
If seat selection is free and we’re traveling as a couple, we always select an aisle and a middle seat so we can sit together. When seat selection is free and we travel with the little one, we always choose to sit with the kiddo in a middle seat between us. Would imagine that most couples with a kid or two would be happy with their child or children between them and that middle seats are lower demand for an individual traveler.
If we have to pay for the seats, though, we’re not going to pay extra for a lower demand middle seat. So, we either leave things to chance or pay to select three aisle seats clustered nearby (which no doubt makes assigning other nearby seats more complicated).
Because the most profitable airlines tend to optimize turnaround time with planes on the ground for as short of a time as possible, making families sit scattered around probably actually increases boarding/unboarding time. It wouldn’t be surprising if the time added by this algorithm actually costs more than the money made by the seat payments.
Time value of money. Something to think about, discount carriers…
This isn’t the only place that businesses find it advantageous to be annoying in hopes of extorting a reprieve from the annoyance. It seems like this is the business model for a lot of software and media these days. Bill collectors. Cable companies. Self driving cars will be a goldmine.
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Airlines don’t care about satisfaction (evidently) except perhaps at the extreme high-end. You put up with airlines because you need to be somewhere else and flying is frequently the only way to do it. And you can’t pick airlines freely because your choice is constrained by the route and timetable you need and is likely made by algorithm.
In other words, most people can’t opt-out of flying and so the game isn’t to ensure repeat business but to see how much money can be extracted from these people. This is what makes flying such an excruciatingly unpleasant experience.
And I don’t even think it is late- or final- stage capitalism. It’s just plain old capitalism. Capitalism is like a blind AI optimization process: what can be done to maximize profit? The market, in theory, aligns the goals of the consumers with those of the company by withholding custom (and therefore profit) unless customer needs are met. In practice, companies act exactly like machine learning algorithms which will unerringly and invariably do the absolute minimum to fit the constraints you specify even if it means doing only what you said and nothing you wanted. Stuff like deleting the contents of the ‘desired output’ file and then outputting nothing which an automated programming algorithm settled on as a universal solution to any problem given to it.
So it is here. Since you have to fly the company is cheerfully indifferent to your anger and misery as long as you keep paying. And you will. Because you have to be in place X and that’s an end to that.
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I largely agree with you. But I am old enough to remember when large corporations - including a couple I worked for - had values and ethics that went beyond pure profit.
They recognised stakeholders other than stockholders. Employees, the environment, the communities they operated within, and customers were held up as having high value and to whom they owed a duty. Those corporations are today almost without any such values. Employees are assets to be disposed of/exploited as they see fit with no regard for their welfare; environmental/community duties are purely for PR purposes and entirely superficial/adhered to only insofar as not doing so would be bad PR.
Some recognise that environmental values can be positive for the bottom line, but unless this is directly measurable in the short term it gets relegated quickly.
And with good timing, today I read this, which includes the idea that corporations “are intrinsically sociopathic – they … stand apart from the rest of society, existing for themselves and only for themselves, caring nothing for the norms and rules of society, and obeying only the letter (as distinct from the spirit) of the law.” Too right.
(It’s an article whose premise is that AIs and corporations have common traits.)
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