41 Percent of Fliers Think You’re Rude If You Recline Your Seat
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
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/...
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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?
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.
Your second point about safety is a completely separate issue.
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.
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... ^^
I will say sleeping on flight isn't easy. I've flown a lot and have been lucky enough to be in real business class three times (British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, and a budget airline) and I've only slept once ever in all that flying. Virgin Atlantic's completely flat beds got me snoring (the other two airline's "almost flat" chairs did nothing).
What are you the nap police? Flying sucks and I need to lose consciousness to deal with it.
Oh, yes, there was an adjustable leg rest, too.
I'd love to be able to travel like that today (but of course I probably wouldn't be able to afford it...)
The big question is whether you're willing to spend 72 hours in one of those roomy coach seats (more like 80+ hours if you include connections). People fly because 5 hours of extreme discomfort is usually preferable to 72 hours of mild/moderate discomfort.
That being said, this is pitting two victims of an airline's policy against each other, not particularly constructive.
Secondly: If the person behind you has long legs it damn right hurts when the person in front reclines. As in "popping painkillers" level of pain. When you recline, their knees have nowhere to go, so they end up being compressed between the back of your seat and the cushion of their seat. Oh and every time you move your seat bounces up and down, straight onto their knees pressed firmly against your seat back.
So to be entirely clear we're talking about "genuine pain, not moderate inconveniences" for the person behind you. I take extra strong painkillers onto flights so that the 5' person in front of me can feel mildly more comfortable.
If the seats recline, then the person in the seat should be able to recline without judgement. If you have a problem with a reclining seat in from of you, choose an airline without reclining seats or upgrade to a seat with more leg room.
Airlines don't offer rows where the seats in front don't recline as a feature (although rarely the seats in wing exit rows don't recline).
And, yes, if everyone could just upgrade at 300x the cost then all of the issues would be solved. Next let's just give everyone $1,000,000 so that poverty is solved! That will work, why did nobody suggest that?!
I fly Delta a lot and their economy comfort is not 300x the price. It's a fraction of the ticket price. You could turn it around and demand the reclining passenger move to economy comfort. Fair enough, but what of the passenger directly behind their row?
In the end it comes back to what the airline is offering the passenger. If they didn't want/expect passengers to recline they would remove reclinable seats.
I'll say this again like I say in every discussion about reclining seats. Most Delta flights I've been on lately use a different recline system. The seat recline pivot seems to be near the arm rest and the seat bottom slides forward. I usually have MORE knee room if people recline. Sure, I lose space from the waist up, but I can live with that.
In the end, I'm also tall and the knee room is important to me but the recline is more important.
I just checked, the cheapest I can find is 200x the ticket price (e.g. $500 Vs. $1000 for economy Vs. comfort+). 300x is definitely common too depending on how popular the flight is (e.g. $500 Vs. $1500).
> Most Delta flights I've been on lately use a different recline system. The seat recline pivot seems to be near the arm rest and the seat bottom slides forward.
It depends how high the person behind knees are. If you're cramped into the seat, your knees have to go higher to fit at all. The design you're talking about only works when the seats aren't too close together, once they get that close it still impedes leg/knee room.
I've been on Delta flights a lot, they suck.
They often do: bulkhead seats. However, these have other tradeoffs. [0]
[0] For a quick rundown: http://www.seatguru.com/articles/bulkheads.php
Just sayin'
Given that it doesn't hurt the person in front of them, no, you couldn't.
Darn them for having the audacity of being born with long legs... The nerve of some people...
I've also learned to lower the armrest as soon as I sit down. If an overweight person sits next to you, it will be impossible to lower it and they will be taking up part of your seat.