En guard. The audacious practice of airlines charging their valuable customers to choose a seat is slowly spreading. The airlines, nomenclature-meisters all, call this trend “unbundling”, charging for things that used to be standard. Once upon a time, in an industry far, far away, the privileged purchaser of an airplane trip could count on the airline racking their brains to figure out how to make the experience grander, in a time-honored business practice of attempting to lure the customer into willingly becoming a repeat customer.
Those days seem romantic now. It’s been a while since I’ve boarded a plane that showed anything other than contempt for me. Passengers and airlines have settled into a mutual hatred for each other. It all started, as you know, when airlines figured out they could get away with forcing people to pay to check their luggage. They started at $15 or $25 dollars, and now sometimes your second checked bag costs $100. Starting in 2007, U.S.-based airlines collected 464 million dollars in baggage fees. In 2015, they collected 3.5 billion.
The floodgates were open, and soon there were suggestions of other things. Are you aware of all that’s being unbundled lately?
- Emergency row seating
- Printed tickets
- Your ability to board the plane in anything but the dead last order
- Carry-ons (there have been attempts, but I think those will fail)
- Food of any sort but those little peanut packs.
- Booze
- Headphones for the in-flight entertainment
- Checking in at the airport, instead of online
- Using your frequent-flyer miles (they’re not free anymore and haven’t been for a while)
- Blankets and pillows
Airlines claim that this allow passengers who don’t use those services to save money and such, an attempt at verbal jujitsu that no one believes, and has been rather disproved, here, here, and everywhere else.
Moreover, in an unashamed jump-the-shark move, Ryan Air (the “Trump University” of the transportation world) floated the idea of charging to use the lavatory, yes, which led to the almost-sole instance of revolt-type feedback. USAirways (which is no more) charging for bottled water, and several airlines attempting to charge for carry-on luggage, may be the only others that successfully were repealed. Everyone who travels had watched the slow-creep of extra charges with horror and wonder. Wonder as in: why don’t we stop them? The clear answer is there is no “we”. We shall circle back to this stepping stone.
Baggage fees, if nothing else, are here to stay. Food for sale on board as well. Most transportation pundits blame us, the consumers, claiming we’ll look to the lowest fare no matter what, conveniently forgetting that these fees are not apparently up front when one purchases an airline ticket.
Your second bag is always going to be hopeless in the future
The concept of what exactly is included in an airline ticket has been torn asunder. I’m sure people have already pointed out that your ticket nowadays is good for nothing else besides your physical seat on the plane. But now even that’s chancy, because more airlines are charging to choose a seat.
I first encountered this new charge in October 2015, on a British Airways flight from Lisbon to Washington, DC. After purchasing the ticket online (of course), I went to choose my seat, as one does, and found that British Airlines wanted to charge me $25 for the newly-defined privilege. My eyes grew wide and my jaw did push-ups. Charging for choosing your seat? Not economy plus or some premium seat, or for an emergency row, but just a normal seat. They charge this fee even for business class, insane.
If you didn’t succumb to BA’s dictum and pay in advance, you eventually are able to choose your own seat, but that happens only online 24 hours in advance of the flight, meaning everyone on that flight was desperately logging in to BA’s site the day before in order to avoid a dreaded middle seat.
A few friends advised me to swallow my umbrage and pay. This was an overseas flight after all. I refused, it was a point of pride with me, and thus I found myself (with my pride) in a middle seat for the first time in perhaps a decade.
As I write this, I’m off on a flight to Slovenia in a few months. It’s a strange booking, combining two one-way fares, and thus using a combination of Condor Airlines, Adria Airways, and Turkish Airlines. And it appears that on none of them can I choose a seat.
Screenshot of part of Condor’s webpage. No phone # for the call centre and no link to choose the seat.
I’ve already wasted hours of my life trolling through the respective websites of the three airlines, fruitlessly searching for any button to click remotely labeled “choose seats”. Even for those that say you can choose a seat, there are no links to do so. Not prepared to face the indifferent winds of chance, I ripped off emails to the three airlines asking how I can secure a seat.
Ten minutes later, my phone rang. Astonishingly, it was Turkish Airlines. The polite woman told me of several local options I could use to contact them (such as their 800 number), and I thought that was going to be it. But no, she had my flight information pulled up (and thus I didn’t have to find my booking # again) and to my further astonishment, she walked me through my flights, asking about aisle, middle, window seats, and did I want front, middle, back of the plane? After discussing, she suggested seat numbers for me and entered them into the system, and we were done. Damn.
Turkish Airlines is one of the more highly-rated airlines in the world, and is near on top for Europe. I can see why. I’ve flown them before (indeed, to Turkey) and enjoyed them. Full marks for the call, but it still doesn’t answer why I wasn’t able to do this service myself online. If I hadn’t written, my seat would be up to chance.
Condor Airlines and Adria Airways both sent me back automatic form letters saying thanks for your email, we’ll be in touch. Condor’s website says that seat reservations start at $12.99 (They move up from there, to a max of $39.99).
Three days later, Adria sent me this brief email:
“At the moment seat selection is still free of charge. If you wish we can book seats for you. Please advise where you whist to sit.”
And of course I wrote back saying I merely want an aisle seat, and why wasn’t that possible to do online. The next day I had a response:
“I make seat assignment, on our flight from Frankfurt to Ljubljana you have 6b seat.
No, there is no option to choose a seat, when you are making reservation. You are able to choose the seat at the check-in.”
Again, thanks for the help, but I’m not sure I’m flying them again if I can’t choose a seat.
As for Condor, they wrote back a week later
“We kindly ask you to contact your travel provider regarding your seat assignment request. Unfortunately we cannot access your booking in order to make changes or add special services.”
Let’s emphasize that I informed them of my name and my Booking Number, as well as the dates and destinations. And they are the airline. The airline I am flying somehow cannot access my booking. I wrote back expressing my incredulous state and my utmost disturbance. Besides the seat thing, I shall need to confirm the hell out of the general flight itself before I show up at the airport and they inform me, “Unfortunately we cannot access your booking.”
Get used to the view from the middle seat
Since I’m traveling solo on these two trips, it took me a bit to discern the blindingly obvious, as to who would absolutely pay a fee to reserve a seat: people traveling together. If I’m flying overseas with my wife, absolutely we want to sit together (though perhaps I shouldn’t assume that on her part).
Now let us cast our eyes to the family with two kids. Are the airlines prepared to randomly assign a seat to a twelve-year old, possibly placing her fourteen rows away from either of her parents, unless they pay up? That’s $100 extra for that family. That fee is usually per flight segment, meaning for my trip to Slovenia, it would be $400 extra for that family. This is extortion. Moreover, if the flight is oversold, you without the paid seat assignment are the most likely to be bumped.
AirfareWatchDog.com calls the seat choice “Long a perk that came without charge…” No, no. When we passengers concede that some now-unbundled feature was a “perk”, we’re giving ammunition for the airlines to take it away. When someone says the feature used to be “free”, no again. Choosing seats, checking bags, were never free. They were part of the total price we paid. Choosing your seat however, is not like checking a second bag–it doesn’t cost the airline anything. There is no extra fuel or labor involved.
Just this week, in the U.S., two Democrat Senators introduced the “Forbid Airlines from Imposing Ridiculous Fees Act of 2016 (FAIR Fees Act)“. It would prohibit airlines from charging fees that are “not reasonable and proportional”, which is quite the loose definition. The specifics of such would be staggering, and this of course may be overreaching. Above I wrote that there is no “we” to stop the airlines from charging whatever they want. It’s fairly clear that market forces have not gotten rid of these fees; they’re only increased them. This type of action may be the only “we” that we have.
I’m only a small market force, but I intend to keep badgering my airlines until I can choose a seat. The next time you fly and find an unbundled type of fee that seems unreasonable, take the time to go to the airline’s web page, click the “contact us” or “feedback” link, and dash off a quick missive saying that you don’t like it and you want to fly an airline without such a fee. At the moment, that’s all we’ve got.
