Airlines face investigation for splitting up families on flights | Hacker News Reader

Airlines face investigation for splitting up families on flights

independent.co.uk

54 pointsknown36 comments

Misleading title (FIXED —thanks dang).

We don’t have evidence the airlines used an “exploitative” algorithm. Just a statistical allegation and airlines’ denial of wilful malfeasance. To the airlines’ credit, simply having lots of single flyers pre-selecting window and aisle seats will lead to families of three or more being split up more frequently; no nefariousness needed.

Ok, we changed the title to something less misleading.

> We don’t have evidence the airlines used an “exploitative” algorithm

Don't we? Europe’s biggest airline said:

'those who don’t pay to choose a seat are “randomly” assigned one'

Well that is an algorithm for splitting non paying families up in almost all cases, isn't it?

It's an algorithm for allocating groups, not necessarily one that specifically targets families. Splitting up families might be just a sideeffect.

The difference between a group and a family should be obviously clear to the airlines algorithm when it looks at the age of the travelers.

Not all families are Parents & little Children. A couple is also a family. Parents with their adult children are also Family.

And whether their splitting-algorithm is expliciet splitting up families, or simply splitting up ALL groups, we don't know. We don't even know whether it's splitting on purpose, or just taking the first free seats, often resulting in a split.

But it's more likely that some lazy programmer just choose to use the solution which involved the least amount of work and complexity.

> She added: “Some airlines have set an algorithm to identify passengers of the same surname travelling together.

That reads like something that might specifically target families.

Yes, that is the claim of that Digital Minister. But there is no proof for it yet. The cited europe’s biggest airline only admits that random allocating happens, not targeted.

I have been thinking about this sort of thing quite a lot - while I do think it's wrong to split people up on a plane, it is quite an interesting concept.

A similar but less malicious case would be one of organising the seating on a train or in a cinema, but rather then biasing against families, biasing against other, unrelated groups.

For example - in a cinema, you usually do not wish to sit right beside another group when the rest of the seats are free. Still, you don't want to be that far from the center.

How do you design an algorithm for this? How will it scale? How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats? How do you avoid having individual seats that nobody wants?

> How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats?

You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.

Well if you get assigned bad seats you might not come back, for this sort of thing I would say happy customers would lead back into more money

>> You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.

> Well if you get assigned bad seats you might not come back, for this sort of thing I would say happy customers would lead back into more money

There's a lot of space between making customers so unhappy they never return and making them happy. The smart capitalist will eagerly trade the happiness if his customers for more profit, so long as he doesn't hit a tipping point that destroys his business.

I heard of a story where Walmart did an experiment in one of their stores where they rearranged all of the displays, made the aisles wider, all sorts of things which made the shopping experience more pleasant and less stressful. Customer feedback was almost unanimously positive; people loved shopping at Walmart now, when previously it had been a hostile and Kafkaesque experience.

But they spent less money.

So Walmart put everything back the way it was.

Just like McDonalds with its seating that is just the right amount of uncomfortable to get the customer out of there ASAP after eating, but not quite that uncomfortable that they wouldn't go there at all.

I feel this goes on a lot in retail as well, eg music in clothing stores. Also Ikea with its mazes and the milk always being at the furthest end of the supermarket.

As someone who is quite sensitive to such uncomfortable situations, I'm at the end of the bell curve that finds the whole experience so unpleasant that I just avoid stores mostly.

While not exactly the answer to your questions, problems of a similar nature ("how to most efficiently use a space for some or multiple purposes") can be solved using Golomb rulers [1]. I first learned about them when I played with the Distributed.net client to calculate optimal Golomb rulers. I feel they or a similar class of tools can be used as the answer to your questions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler

Every major cinema I know of in San Francisco allows seats to be reserved on a first come first serve basis. All seats cost the same. It’s extremely simple, and while there might be some negative effect for the cinema whereby people won’t buy tickets for a showing if they see all the good seats are taken, but I strongly suspect that is far overwhelmed by the effect of people going to the cinema more often because they know they won’t have to show up early or worry about getting decent seats.

Cinemas where I am usually don't have allocated seats. Now that you've prompted me to think about it, that fact definitely makes me less likely to go.

Pay money and have a fair chance of getting a seat I'm not happy with? No thanks.

Honestly I don't have much sympathy. People have gotten the airline system they've asked for by basing their purchasing decisions solely on price. The natural end result is that things that were previously included in that airfare get removed and because paid extras in this race to the bottom.

Personally I don't even book an airfare where I can't pick my seats as part of the booking process.

Now if the EU wants to create a passenger bill of rights of sorts that disallows this and other practices (eg charging for checked bags) then fine. But know that those charges will just go back to being included in the ticket (ie higher fares).

I don’t see how your comment addresses the allegations in this article. The airlines allegedly use an algorithm that detects family members on a flight and deliberately seats them separately to try to upsell them to manual seat selection. That has nothing to do with any passenger making a purchasing decision based solely on price.

> airlines allegedly

Researcher says it looks more than random. Airlines are saying it’s random. Until someone finds proof of airlines biasing randomisation algorithms against families this is all speculation.

“Europe’s biggest airline never admitted to changing the way seating was allocated, insisting there was no change and saying that those who don’t pay to choose a seat are ‘randomly’ assigned one.”

I have no ability to determine the validity of the allegations. I was only commenting on the relevance of the previous comment to the allegations mentioned in the article.

It was a diplomatic wording. I've flown cheap EU airlines many times with another person (20+/year). The first time I didn't seat with other passengers is after the "pay more to guarantee sitting together" was introduced.

This is not even matching surname. If you don't pay, you're virtually guaranteed that the other person on your booking sits somewhere else.

Of course it does. The reason Ryanair can sell seats for not much above zero is that other customers are paying more. People choose Ryanair because they offer those cheap seats, not because they like the service.

Or because they're the only airline on a given route. Both Ryanair and Easyjet have the only available flights between many places. Even if I did want to pay more for something less terrible, I can't.

What's worse is that in practice what this means is that those family members will badger other passengers to swap seats with them in order to sit together which can frequently lead to disgruntlement and argument.

I have very little sympathy for people that expect me to just swap seats with them. Their failure to plan and prepare adequately does not constitute a crisis on my part. Especially if I did go ahead and pay the $15 extra or whatever for that particular seat.

This doesn't really apply to the cheapest airlines. You can't choose your seat there anyway. Unless you book the exit row, you get an assigned place, not a "particular seat".

Air travel isn’t always a luxury expense. Some people can’t afford anything except the cheapest ticket. It’s rather dismissive to blame them instead of the large airline companies who want to make a profit. Just because you can buy a more expensive ticket for better seating doesn’t mean everyone can.

Previously included benefits becoming paid extras is one thing, but deliberately creating an artificial hindrance which is a paid extra to resolve is quite another, especially when it's obviously a grave compromise of passenger safety.

> The natural end result is that things that were previously included in that airfare

I think this one is very different to other cases. Other additions normally actually cost money - more baggage/weight does translate into higher cost. More space in the seat does mean higher cost.

On the other hand the seating arrangement is purey exploitative. It wasn't didn't cost anything and splitting up groups actually cost the airline some development time to create.

What's the actual allegation here? That by charging money to choose a seat, families are discouraged from paying money to choose to sit next to each other and so often end up split up?

I'm not a huge fan of the trend to charge for seat choice. But doing so lets less price-sensitive people who are picky about seat choice to subsidize everyone else.

To account for the safety issue, probably the ideal would be requiring parents accompanying a minor to pay for one choice seat (in that, once the random seat is assigned, they should be able to choose for the other seat to be adjacent to it). That'd stick in people's craws, though.

Maybe subsidizing kids to be able to sit with their parents should be considered common decency.

> Maybe subsidizing kids to be able to sit with their parents should be considered common decency

Honestly, why? I sat alone on long flights as a kid. I learned to talk to strangers, ask for juice when I wanted it, and get out of my seat when I needed to bug my parents. Today, as a single traveler, I don’t want to subsidise families who wish to travel together and not pay for it.

It's almost as if the airlines are saying, "Please regulate us. We can't control ourselves!"

It's crystal clear when you book that you can either pay for a reserved seat or be assigned one randomly. If sitting together is important to you, pay for a reserved seat.

The constant complaints of Ryanair are ridiculous. You're paying $25 to fly from London to Dublin -- an amazing deal -- so, yes, it's not going to be first class accommodations.

The difference is - this was changed from the previous approach. Before, in a small group you sat next to your partner almost always. Now, you're actually not going to sit next to them unless you pay. The airline spent time and money to make this happen, so that is a real complaint. You can get randomly assigned a sit next to another person from a split couple - so there's an obvious solution that makes at least 2 people more happy.

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