Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

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I'd love to see this cross-referenced by leg length.

A lot of shorter people literally don't seem to understand why reclining could be "rude" when as they like to parrot "I paid for this seat! I'm entitled to!" Try being someone with long legs and having the person in front of you bounce up and down on your knees for several hours, let me tell you, it is as fun as it sounds.

That being said, the problem isn't with short people, or people who recline in general. The problem is with a race to the bottom that the government should have regulated several inches ago.

Airlines keep making their seat pitch (distance between your spine and the spin of the person in front) narrower and narrow, year upon year. It started out to add extras rows, now they just do it so they can sell that seat pitch back to people as "Premium Comfort" or "Premium Economy."

Airlines are now only judged by the economy price on ticket comparison websites. So if one airline takes 2 inches of seat pitch but also reduces the price by $10/flight, then another has to do the same to remain competitive.

Ultimately at some stage we need to just sit down and decide what the minimum seat pitch should be, and then have every airline in the country stick to that. It effectively ends the race to the bottom we have now, as there is now a lower bar (and one that doesn't have passengers fighting in the isles about reclining).

I'd also like to see airline seats redesigned. They've barely changed in many years, and only one major company manufacturers them.

http://www.independenttraveler.com/travel-tips/travelers-ed/...

Alaska airlines recently did a seat-redesign to seats that don't recline, but supposedly have ergonomic improvements. The in-seat cards advertise that the designs are by Recaro (a well-known premium baby car-seat maker).

Didn't seem to make much difference at all: the biggest variance was still absolute space: the "premium economy" seats were no worse, the non-premium economy were no better. As someone with both lower back pain (a slight recline helps a lot) and long legs (the person in front bumps me) it was pretty much a wash.

Isn't Recaro primarily well known for their racing seats? Rather odd to see the company referenced for its baby seats, is that a local thing for you?

In my part of the U.S., it's the "high end European" baby seat brand so that's where I first heard of them, but then I'm not into racing. The AK airline ad card, IIRC, mentioned baby seats (maybe trying to appeal to my demographic, or going for the "cradles you like a baby" theme...)

90% of your problem can be fixed by you ponying up for the "extra leg room" seats. For the other 10%, it seems a lot easier to just have Kayak give the option of a "seat size penalty" which each flyer can set for themselves. If it's a matter of getting the info, then by all means require by law that data to be given as part of the ticketing search process as well.

But please don't pass legislation that prevents me from saving the $10. I want the money, and I'm willing to sit in a smaller seat.

"Seat size penalties" in airfare search engines will not work. The airlines have learned, often the hard way, that besides price, absolutely no other factors of any sort whatsoever are relevant. The vast majority of travelers will claim in surveys that they care about things like legroom, good service, not paying extra for a bag, etc., but then the instant you put them in front of a search page to choose a flight they proceed to choose based on price, only price and nothing but price.

Business travelers have higher standards, but they're simply drowned out -- Scott Kirby (President of American Airlines) was recently quoted in media as claiming that, among unique passengers carried by AA, 87% fly one trip per year or less, and those flyers account for over half of the airline's revenue.

Tellingly, this was used to justify AA joining Delta in rolling out a super-bare-bones fare class designed to compete for the "choose based on price and only price" market, and carrying similar restrictions and conditions to the standard tickets of the ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit and Allegiant.

As an aside, it will be interesting to watch how this plays out in the next couple of years; Delta, which is generally the leader in implementing major changes among the three remaining big legacy carriers, has just announced changes which make their small number of extra-legroom coach seats, previously free for people holding status in their frequent-flier program, much harder to get without buying a ticket in a higher fare class (effectively, they now will sell those seats as a separate "premium economy" style cabin and fare, despite being neither a separate cabin nor anywhere close to the actual premium-economy offerings of European airlines). Since most business travelers are required to book into lower fare classes, on Delta they'll be forced into knee-and-spine-crushing seats. Whether that will lead to decision-makers at those companies switching their contracts away from Delta, and thus finally claw back some ground from the ultra-price-sensitive race to the bottom prevailing in the industry, remains to be seen.

Not sure if you're trying to disagree with me.

(1) When people claim they care about X on surveys, but then don't back it up when they actually have to spend their own money, I trust the second measure as their "real" preference more than their first. (Lots of ways to justify this, but the single biggest one is just that survey answers are wildly inconsistent with each other.)

(2) Insofar as preference depend on nudges/framing -- that is, insofar as preferences aren't even uniquely defined -- then you need to actually test the various nudge. Seat size penalties have never been tried, so your claim that "evidence says people won't look at anything but price" isn't valid. Maybe you didn't understand what I meant by this? The whole point is to adjust the price on the search page to incorporate those other factors. If, in this situation, people continue to seek out tiny seats, then by golly, I think we should conclude that those seats represent their true preferences.

I think everything else you've written is also consistent with my primary claim, which is that we should not legislate seat sizes. I appreciate the other info, though.

Hard to see where you're coming from when from your perspective everyone has tons of excess money laying around and simply chooses not to spend it.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe everyone else isn't as affluent as you clearly are? We don't choose not to fly in first because we are saving for a Ferrari or a cruise, or whatever you rich people buy.

If economy wasn't available at the price it is available at then we literally wouldn't be able to fly AT ALL. That's where a lot of people are at financially, they can afford one return ticket a year, in economy.

This only gets more obvious when you look at a family of four... You'll wind up paying as much for the Premium Economy upgrade (4x) as you would for a used car ($5K+).

Did your parents give you a "small one million dollar loan" too?

Insofar as preference depend on nudges/framing -- that is, insofar as preferences aren't even uniquely defined -- then you need to actually test the various nudge.

The airlines already have the ability to "nudge" and "frame"; the big three legacy carriers in the US all have flight-search interfaces which show you the different types of fares and highlight the conveniences that come with them.

People still just pick whichever one is cheapest and then complain about how awful it is. Two of the three big legacies have, as I noted, already begun the rollout of ultra-bare-bones no-conveniences fares for this very reason: they have the data and they know what works.

I think everything else you've written is also consistent with my primary claim, which is that we should not legislate seat sizes. I appreciate the other info, though.

I think we are at or near the point where seat pitch and size will need to be legislated, not for comfort but for safety. As I understand it, many safety tests (such as verifying emergency evacuation within a required minimum time) on airliners are already conducted using cabin arrangements with significantly higher pitch than is typical for actual aircraft in service. And as seat pitch decreases various flying-induced medical conditions either become more likely or are exacerbated.

And when something is affecting safety, I will absolutely support legislation to deal with that.

From your first point ("show you the different types of fares and highlight the conveniences that come with them"), it's clear that you don't understand what I'm proposing.

Your second point about safety is a completely separate issue.

American, Delta and United are all up-front during the flight search process about what type of seat you're getting.

Either you are booking regular economy (awful), or extra-legroom economy ("Main Cabin Extra" on AA, "Comfort+" on DL, "Economy Plus" on UA), or first/business class.

Delta is also up-front about when you're booking its "Basic Economy" fare type, which has extra fees for basically everything other than walking through the door of the plane. AA, when it rolls out its version, will almost certainly do the same.

And once again the reason why those "basic" fares are coming into existence is the tried and tested knowledge of the airlines on what matters to most of the people buying airline tickets: price, only price and nothing but price. They're not dumb; in fact, some very smart people are doing the behind-the-scenes work of deciding what fare classes to sell, how many seats in each fare class to sell, etc., and they have access to mountains of data on customer behavior to guide them.

For a more HN-friendly analogy, treat having a disaggregated ultra-basic fare among the five cheapest for the route as being in the top five results on Google for a search term. It simply does not matter what else anyone does: the low fare and the high Google search-result position are going to overwhelmingly win.

Yes, make tall people pay more. And to be truly free market about this, airlines should charge flyers both by volume and weight. Just like UPS.

You're right. Let's legislate to require that clothing prices not depend on size either. What are we, cattle?

I know you were being sarcastic, but airlines should start charging more if you are overweight, but NOT if you are tall. Height is genetic and normal and can't be changed. Being overweight is not normal and can be changed. It is that simple.

How do you know you're actually saving anything whatsoever? Did the seats get cheaper as they got more crowded? Or did they just start charging extra for the few seats with a little more room?

Just pay for the more expensive seat. The cheaper it is to travel the more people will do it, a definite plus in my book!

You pay all the time for being tall, short, old... I don't see why flying should be any different. Perhaps because airplanes can feel like some weird hierarchy sometimes but that's basically society anyway... ^^

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