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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

What got me recently was the fee to select a seat on a flight. I'm traveling with my family, including a 12 yo kid. Am I going to let her sit between two strange men for the flight? Of course not! So I have no choice but to pay the $50/seat (or whatever the amount was) so we can all sit together. This is criminal! Who will be held responsible if my kid gets assaulted in the flight?

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This leads to another awful behavior. Have seen too many instances, including by friends of mine, where instead of paying the uncharge they let the airline assign seats. And then they put up a fuss when people won't swap seats with them when they board. What's worse, often the flight attendants will side with these people.

As someone who always pays extra to choose my seat, no. It is not my problem if people can't be bothered to do the same thing.

Don't even start me on Southwest, where a bunch of people will fill up window, aisle, down the plane, so good luck to you if you board later with two or more in your party.

That's been Southwest's business model for 40 years or more. It's not a secret and they do allow you to pay extra to board first. Otherwise, you need to check-in right when it opens. If that isn't acceptable to you there are other airlines.

> Otherwise, you need to check-in right when it opens.

Does that always work? I flew on Southwest a few times recently, and by the last one, I learned to check in right when it opened 24 hours before, and I still ended up in groups B and C on the 2 legs.

It almost always used to, but in the last year or so it’s been much less reliable for me.

I think it’s probably a mix of more people having status because of COVID causing the airlines to extend their rewards periods and then more people deciding to pay the $25 ish to not have to deal with checking in on time.

> This is criminal! Who will be held responsible if my kid gets assaulted in the flight?

I was with you until you went off the deep end here.

Following the stated logic the parent could be charged for child endangerment for not paying the extra $50.

The assailant, one would hope and expect?

The upside of this is that you save $50 on your flight if you're willing to sit alone in a middle seat, thus making air travel more accessible to more people. $50 means a lot to some people.

It's really all about how you perceive this. You see it as a hidden cost, others see it as a discount.

This is right. Cheap seats enable lower income people to travel.

Airfare is (generally) cheaper than when it was regulated.

That being said the US rule that requires airlines to give you 24hr window to cancel a flight after booking is great.

It's not a hidden charge because as you said, you can still travel without paying it.

And it provides a method of price discrimination between people who care where they sit and those who don't.

A hidden charge would be if you had to pay for seat selection to sit anywhere at all and it wasn't included in the original price.

The problem is that the person that a kid gets put next to isn’t a babysitter, and shouldn’t have to be one.

I don’t want to have to explain to a kid that they need to put their phone in silent or use headphones, I don’t want to have to keep them from kicking the seat in front of them, etc.

The reality is that there is a base level of decency that should exist. That includes not splitting up children from their guardians.

If you want to charge people for picking their seats, fine. Charging parents to not be separated from their kids is just plain evil. Choosing your seat for $50, and seating a person with their legal companion (or disability aide), even if you didn’t pay extra, are possible at the same time.

As an aside, I’m not entirely convinced that my ticket is $50 less than it would have been with seating fees.

It is quite obviously $50 cheaper. The people who picked their seats paid that $50. Again, you have an option here. If you must sit with you're party, you pay the fee. This isn't a junk fee. It is clearly presented when you select the type of ticket you wish to purchase.

Your complaint has to do with price discrimination. Different levels of service have different prices the same way a Volkswagen costs less than an Audi made in the same factory.

You might have missed my point about the $50. I’m not saying it’s a junk fee, I’m saying it’s abusive to charge it to guardians of children.

I’m also wondering if before the fee was added as an option the price was $50 more since everyone got to choose their seat. I suspect that the fare is about the same, but now you get to pay $50 more to choose your seat.

You are also missing that there is an external cost of splitting up parents and children. The airline is shifting the cost of babysitting onto other passengers when it should be forced to be a responsibility/cost of the guardian.

By the logic of the airline if I don't get to pick my seat, and get placed next to a minor, shouldn’t I get compensated more for that than someone who is sat next to a person who doesn’t need my assistance in an emergency? Should I also get compensated for not getting a drink, what about if I don’t use the restroom.

At a certain point, it is ok to say that a part of living in society is that you don’t get to separate parents from their children.

I understand the economic argument (You’ve used “price discrimination” incorrectly here, incidentally, since price discrimination has to do with receiving the same product at a different price, not receiving an additional service for an additional price). I’m just saying that this is irresponsible and unethical corporate behavior even if it is economically maximizing profit (in the short term anyway)

How is babysitting the child next to you your problem? Just put your noise canceling headphones on and ignore them. If they're kicking the seat in front of them, that person can complain to the flight attendant or whatever

When was the last time you spent 3 hours sitting inches from a 7 year old?

At some point it will become your problem whether you are active or passive.

If you want, you can wait until you have a lapful of juice and snacks spilled on you.

Assaulted on a flight? Stranger danger, I guess, but this seems like a very low odds event.

It may be rare, but it absolutely does happen. https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article279873...

Sure, anything can and does happen. But how many similar assaults happen annually by strangers at a Starbucks/bus/library/school? Life is a risk.

How many of those assign you to sit next to a stranger for many hours unless you pay an additional fee?

Kids sitting alone on a plane is a very solvable problem. It used to be unheard of just a few years ago.

When I was in either 4th or 5th grade a friend of mine living in another state flew by himself to visit my family. For obvious reasons he was sitting by himself on a flight.

Under a certain age, this requires a fee and coordination with the airline. I did it too; a flight attendant was tasked with supervising me and I was escorted to my connection and pickup. It’s not the same thing.

Those are called "unaccompanied minors". The airline takes full responsibility for them; including having the flight attendants check on them regularly. And at the end of the flight, they are handed over to a pre-determined adult.

There's a whole protocol followed.

People also get struck by meteorites, most people do not change their behavior to take this into account.

It may be rare, but it absolutely does happen. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12311871/The...

That’s substantially more rare, and substantially less preventable.

Until a few years ago, an extra fee for a child to sit next to their parent on a plane was not the norm. Safety is being reduced for profit.

Sure, I went with it because it was amusing.

Insert basically every other dangerous event that for practical purposes will never happen. People worry too much.

I don't think that's quite right. Until recently, every passenger on the flight had to subsidize your desire to sit next to your child. Now, they don't. It's a loss for you but a win for fairness in general.

Also, there's always Southwest, right?

subsidize ? it doesn't cost the airline anything to seat the tickets of a singular order together.

It doesn't cost anything to write a computer program, yet we still charge for that service.

Travelers seem to buy flights in one way; sort by price ascending and pick the first result. To be in that first position, you have to figure out what you can "unbundle" from the cost of transport. Things you can unbundle include food, checked bags, and now picking the seat you want. Some people are super price sensitive and will gladly save $50 to sit in a middle seat. So everyone's happy, right? The option to choose a seat in advance is still available, but now there is the option to NOT choose a seat and save $50.

The airlines are masters of figuring out what price you're willing to pay.

> It doesn't cost anything to write a computer program, yet we still charge for that service.

We largely don't go "it'll be $5000 for your website, but $7000 if you want me to write it without XSS vulnerabilities" though.

Not a great comparison since every website needs to be vulnerability free, but not every passenger needs or wants to pick their own seat.

I think a good comparison would be a website + hosting. Traditionally, many "agency" type business have designed a website and then hosted it. "Unbundling" would be turning over the source code and letting the customer find hosting at the right price. (At my last job, we did have an agency make our website, and then we hosted it along with the rest of our infrastructure. Incremental hosting cost for us? $0, since we just ran it alongside our internal admin tools, which we were already hosting.)

Just in the past few months alone:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/airlines-flight-sexua...

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article279873...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/woman-groped...

https://nypost.com/2023/06/07/doc-allegedly-gropes-woman-on-...

https://abc7chicago.com/delta-airlines-flight-lawsuit-sexual...

https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/51-ye...

https://news.yahoo.com/alaska-based-army-officer-charged-220...

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/06/23/californi...

I could go on...

How many of those involve unattended kids?

There are ~3 million US airline passengers per day. This does not seem like it refutes the point that these are low odds.

I can also probably find some news reports of cannibals nabbing people at the grocery store. Does not mean I am going to avoid shopping.

> I can also probably find some news reports of cannibals nabbing people at the grocery store. Does not mean I am going to avoid shopping.

Please find any such instances over the past 6 months and list them. If length(your list) > length(my list), you win.

Yeah, this has turned into a length measuring contest.

They should advertise it as a $50 discount if you let them assign your seat instead.

Airlines will book you together if seats still remain together...They're not gonna split you up just for the fun of it.

Only way to guarantee seats remain together is to select seats ahead of time. People complain about "junk fees" because they're mandatory parts of the cost. If a website is upfront about a benefit you're losing, it's not a junk fee.

Lastly, these basic fares are really designed for single travelers on a tight budget with fixed plans. Delta's website makes this clear, and websites that don't make it clear really should.

The question is whether it is understood up front that there is a type of ticket that doesn’t allow seat selection, and that the customer has selected that type of ticket.

Until the last few years, this wasn’t even a thing in the US on major airlines. Then United launched their Basic/Shitty Economy and it’s been a race to the bottom ever since.

Are you sure the people complaining didn't prbook seats. I recommend you look at the fine print. Selecting seats does in no way guarantee you the seat that you have selected. I have seen cases where people who prebooked seats got split up, and didn't get a refund for the selection either.

Qatar openly describes their top tier status as having a benefit of "if you want any seat, taken or not, it's yours (unless another top tier person is sitting there)".

I'm aware that the fine print says "if we have to, we will screw you over" but I fly over a dozen flights a year (108 in my Flighty app) and never had a problem. Airlines have moved me, but they always confirm who I'm flying with and it's always an upgrade to get another group together.

lol no - eg. Ryanair does split you up for “reasons”.

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