Why Budget Airlines Could Soon Charge You to Use the Bathroom | Hacker News Reader

Why Budget Airlines Could Soon Charge You to Use the Bathroom

fivethirtyeight.com

Airlines love shifting revenue from ticket prices onto ancillary fees. Why? Because they're not subject to the same taxation as the revenue generated by the ticket price.

"The government funds a large portion of the aviation system through a 7.5 percent tax on the price of a commercial airline ticket as well as taxes on certain kinds of aviation fuel. But the Treasury Department considers charges outside the base cost of a ticket to be exempt from that tax."

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/baggage-airline-fee-re...

It's basic tax-avoidance. If they need to raise an extra $5 per seat, they're better off increasing the price charger per bag than they are increasing the ticket prices, and that's exactly what has been happening.

I'm surprised it took so long to start doing this.

Aren't those taxes passed to the fliers already? Ie for me the cost of tax usually exceeds the cost of the actual flight ticket.

Some fuel saving measures now studied by airlines are:

-slower speeds to save 100kg of fuel at a 2 hour flight -lower flap setting for landing, requires less thrust for the last 4 min of flight. But it requires more landing distance. -less water on the tanks for the toilets. 60kg less for 100 flights means a significa t saving. -ipads instead of 40 kilos of flight manuals for the cockpit. -taxing with only one engine (this is an old trick) -higher cruise level. -better radar control coordination. A direct vectors can save you minutes of flight. In aproach up to 10min -cleaner aircraft, to avoid drag. -adjusting the lubricating grease for the landing gear and flight controls. Excess uneccesary leaking grease means more weight. -lighter seats -lighter cabin apliances -even more important are newer aiplanes. It used to be normal seeing 20y/o+ airplanes flying in USA and Europe. Now anything older than 12 years is using 20% more fuel than newer versions. This is specially important for long haul airliners like jumbos a340, 767, 777 etc...

I would rather they took the fuel based component out of the ticket price, then charged you an amount at the gate based on the total weight of everything you are bringing on the plane, including yourself. Then you can pay less by bringing less, or pay more to bring more. A gram's a gram.

Using the model from the article, about 33% of the ticket price is total fuel cost, and 16.5% ($1300 of $7900) is 'weight marginal' fuel cost. Combining these two gives us 5.4% of ticket cost on a full airliner is weight marginal fuel cost.

Extracting 5.4% of the ticket price and making it pay-by-weight (or, rather, by the proportion of the total margin weight you make up) seems fair. On the other hand, 5.4% is a pretty small number compared to the other costs associated with "pay by weight". Lots of people would be, justifiably or not, angry about paying more because they are fatter, taller, or not a child even if that is only a few dollars per hundred on the ticket price.

On the other hand, as a tall person I would strongly support being able to pay marginally more for more legroom. Many airlines do this with a tiered model ('premium economy', 'extra comfort', etc), and it works really well for me.

Then just taking in to account the overweight rates at the USA, you are insulting more than half your possible costumers that will happily throw their money at your competition. Ryanair has discovered this after years calling their own passsengers idiots that will take anything for flying for 20€. Lots of Ryanair passengers now fly with Easyjet , Vueling, etc... And Ryanair is changing the saving rules to avoid loosing more market.

That could be considered as discrimination against big tall men(not overweight). Another thing is luggage.

In order for it to be discrimination, it has to be 'unjust' - There is nothing unjust about having larger people pay more because it costs a business more to fly them. If anything, it is unjust that smaller people have to subsidize the cost of others.

What about wheelchairs, service dogs and baby carriers brought on board?

And there's nothing unjust about paying women less because they'll just quit to have babies, right? Society has decided that that's not how it works.

You're allowed to discriminate against even "protected classes" of people if it actually materially affects their performance. If a woman is actually pregnant and can't lift heavy things, and that's part of the job requirement, then you're allowed to not hire her. If a heavy passenger is actually costing you more money for fuel, you'd be allowed to charge that person more for fuel. This is moot though, since height and weight are not protected categories and you can already discriminate against them all you want!

You could make a fair argument along that line if you measured the cost. Just having the baby means a few weeks off at most since there's nothing gender-specific about childcare, average person has about two babies, a couple months out of decades of work, you could reasonably argue that women should make about a quarter of a percent less than men.

My point is, don't bring up a flawed argument that's used to support unfair discrimination to attack another argument. That's nothing more than a strawman.

I don't see how this analogy fits, or what you mean about society, but there's a slight bit of difference between charging someone for direct costs, and jumping to conclusions based on fear, stereotypes, or gender.

There's also a difference between charging someone for actual expenses, and charging someone for presumed future expenses. And there's a difference between someone being charged for what they use, and someone being paid, or not, for purely indirect costs not related to their performance while on the job.

Now, if a 120 lb woman was charged twice as much as a 120 lb man to fly, your analogy might be more applicable.

Is paid maternity leave not actual expenses then?

Paid maternity leave is an actual expense, if it happens. But you were talking about salary. And it is unfair and discriminatory when equally capable women are paid less than men, regardless of the reason it happens, and there are many other reasons than the probability of a woman having a child.

While those facts are true, they don't improve the quality of your analogy, the situation you're bringing up does not stack up the same way as (theoretically) charging someone per pound to fly on a plane. There might be reasons that charging by weight is discriminatory, but you're not convincing me.

> There might be reasons that charging by weight is discriminatory

Charging by X is always discriminatory (on the basis of X), the questions are whether it is morally or legally acceptable discrimination, not whether it is discrimination at all.

That's like saying it's discrimination that a tall person has to buy more food to survive.

That's the whole point of discrimination laws. I don't know if you ever checked but people aren't kidding when they say non-christians, non-whites, ... are more criminal and less smart and ... with the exception of one or two asian ethnicities. In theory saying this by itself is not discriminatory, only acting upon it is, but I doubt most people will agree. But you're going to find actual statistics supporting that. Yet any conclusions obviously are discriminatory.

What's worse is this. Suppose you have 2 groups with each a normal distributed variable (like weight, height, money, likelihood of criminal intent, ...) and let's say a 1% difference in the peak (which is what everyone will always report, standard deviations are also always different, but nobody ever reports them, but when people say Asians are less tall than Caucasians in 1% of cases (real figure is about 6%), this is what they mean). To make things simple, lets say

group A ~ N(100, 10)

group B ~ N(101, 10)

(N(100, 10) is like the "standard" normal distribution for things without reasonable units)

What do you see in practice ? Suppose you meet someone (randomly) from group A and someone (again, uniform random) from group B. What are the chances the member from group A is heavier/taller/richer/more criminal/... than the member of group B ?

E(X > Y, X ~= N(101, 10), Y ~= N(100, 10)) ~ 59%

So in our example, if you meet an Caucasian and an Asian, and there's 1% height difference between the groups, the chance is about 60% that the Caucasian is taller than the Asian. If taken the real figure, 6% difference, then the chance becomes 91%.

This is the problem that causes racism. Tiny differences in a normally distributed variable make a large difference in actual encounters.

Is there anything wrong with discrimination against tall people? It has nothing to do with their age, race, gender or sexual preference, so I think height and weight may actually be fair game.

I hate to be that guy but should we be charging people more (effectively punishing them) for something outside of their control? Sure it may be "fair" in terms of economics, but it's a slippery ethical and moral slope if I've ever seen one.

> should we be charging people more (effectively punishing them) for something outside of their control?

Car insurers charge young people more money, despite their youth being outside of their control.

Are they actually charging young people more, or are they charging inexperienced drivers more?

Yes, they are. I got my drivers license and first car when I was 22. Length of driving history was not a question when I got insurance, and I got charged the same as 22-year-old males who had been driving since they were 16.

Young people.

True, but I do think experience has a lot to do with the equation there. Pretty much all insurances are based on the chance of payout but I don't know if that should apply to the prices of things like physical goods or in this case air travel.

It's dangerously close to an argument such as "People of color have to pay more or can't use this service at all" or "Blonde hair blue eyes" you know?

Wow you're stupid.

A good analogy might be with the clothing industry where larger sizes are more expensive.

What's wrong with with discrimination based on eye color? Shouldn't anyone with blue eyes be killed at birth? That's not on the list you mentioned, so it's fair game, right?

Discrimination based on eye color is completely fair! Blue eyed people have more trouble in bright sunlight, so you can use that as a tiny mark against them in relevant jobs.

I don't know how you confused discrimination with murder, but you should probably double check a dictionary.

chrisBob should have added "legally speaking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

I think killing babies is a big jump from making heavier passengers pay more. The airlines already consider weight in their cost when you pay for baggage.

I am all for charging more to heavier passengers. I appreciate that the first class cabin subsidizes my flight, and I hate the fact that my ticket is more expensive so that the big guy who is invading my personal space doesn't have to pay extra because I am paying an equal share.

People would plan and pack differently if they weren't shielded from the economics of flight this way.

I have been on a few non-commercial flights, and they always make me step on a scale before I get on the plane.

> I have been on a few non-commercial flights, and they always make me step on a scale before I get on the plane.

The weight variation makes a big difference for smaller airplanes. Big airplanes can use a statistical average for weight calculations, but small ones cannot.

The weight calculation is necessary to compute fuel load and takeoff distance, for example.

As I recall, there was a major airline crash once because the airplane was overweight compared to its calculated weight. Since then the airlines revised the average passenger weight upwards.

And the smallest planes have to worry about distribution of passenger weight to maintain proper balance.

This much more than what parent stated.

Invade your personal space? Really? Your personal space? You entitled piece of shit.

I am sorry if I have hurt anyone's feelings. Having someone lean on you for 5 hours because they don't fit in their seat is extremely unpleasant. I thought "invading personal space" would be the polite way to put this.

Make sure to subtract the extra labor cost of doing all these measurements and the loss of customers in implementing this policy.

Airline executive Michael O'Leary's comments about charging you to use the bathroom were a "we're cheap" publicity stunt; no more and no less.

Sure, there's almost an infinitude of theoretically possible micro and macro optimizations that can improve airlines' profitability, especially across 133 million passengers (that's a lot of olives) but most of them aren't quite as promising as they seem. Save fuel by replacing heavyweight but durable IFE system with iPads, for instance? Bet you spend more than the actually realizable fuel savings replacing broken or stolen iPads. By my calculations you lose money if approximately 1 ticket holder in 1000 doesn't return their $250 iPad intact, based on the original article's $32.7M cost saving (25 cents per passenger) even without considering costs of actually rolling them out and phasing out the IFE in the first place. Needless to say, forcing passengers to empty their bowels before flight could have more significant effect on airlines costs and ticket sales. Even Ryanair is on a charm offensive after taking the "we're so cheap we don't care what our customers think schtick too far)

If you really want to save weight or microoptimise revenue the excess passenger weight charge can has been implemented... in Samoa.

> By my calculations you lose money if approximately 1 ticket holder in 1000 doesn't return their $250 iPad intact

Why not install the iPads in the seat backs? It doesn't have to look any different than another IFE, so long as it saves on weight. I'm not sure that it would be worth the cost of retrofitting, but for a new plane it would definitely be worth looking into, provided that the upfront investment is comparable.

The article doesn't actually answer its own question fully. It does not list the estimated cost savings of removing a bathroom (I assume that's how they would save money but the article is incomplete) or of the weight saved by empty bladders vs. full ones. It also assumes that such removal wouldn't have any effect on longer flights, such as international ones, which are often conducted using the same planes. Even the flight listed form Boston to Denver is four and a half hours. It's unlikely that this would keep most people from using the bathroom at least once, even if they had used it before the flight. So the reasoning is flawed across the board and the article incomplete. The other numbers are quite interesting, however.

It also assumes that such removal wouldn't have any effect on longer flights, such as international ones, which are often conducted using the same planes.

It is important for your argument to distinguish international and inter-continental flights. I have been on international -- in the sense of crossing a border and landing in a different country -- flights operated on CRJs. But those are short 30- or 45-minute hops from somewhere in the northern US to somewhere in Canada.

The article's example aircraft is the Boeing 737-700, which can be and is used for intra-north-America (Aeromexico flies them to several US destinations, for example) international flights, intra-Europe flights, etc., but is not used for inter-continental flights, which are generally beyond its operating range.

Aside from the anomaly of BA's specially-configured A318s which fly LCY-JFK (and which can't take off fully loaded at LCY due to runway length, necessitating a fuel stop at SNN on the westbound leg), the smallest aircraft regularly operating such flights is the Boeing 757. And even it is limited in the routes it can fly, often requiring fuel stops based on wind and weather conditions; only the actual widebodies have the natural range necessary to do those routes consistently.

Also, when international-configuration aircraft are used domestically in the US, it is almost always a positioning flight for which tickets happen to be sold (i.e., a plane landed at Hub A and needs to operate a flight from Hub B, so will fly that route, or needs to get from a maintenance hub to the hub it will actually depart from for international operations), or a temporary sojourn from base for a seasonal flight (US Airways, for example, occasionally flies its A330s to Orlando to carry Disney visitors, but keeps them close enough to its international base at PHL to get them back when needed). Those aircraft also are configured differently; the biggest difference from a passenger perspective is the existence of genuine business class or even three-class configuration, which is rare on domestic flights -- typically only the ultra-premium routes like JFK-LAX and JFK-SFO are operated domestic three-class.

It did mention the difference between full/empty bladders:

>So if every passenger remembered to go to the bathroom before boarding, shedding an average of 0.2 liters of urine, the airline would save $2.66 in fuel on this flight alone.

What would happen if an airline published their pricing in $/lbs? You'll know your price only after checking in your bags and getting into a plane by stepping through a scale.

First of all, would that be legal? Secondly, how would that affect the consumer behavior and the competition?

A lot of the weight on an airplane is fixed, so there would still be a fixed charge to add before weight.

I'm also sure many would avoid an airline where weighing in was required, even if that meant paying substantially more to competitors, the airlines wouldn't save enough to make up for lost business.

The whole article is based on false pretense that fuel prices are highest in the known history. The fuel price have been stagnant for the past 60 years. If you use real money, i.e. gold or silver. Fuel prices, food prices, healthcare cost, etc. are all flat line price chart as long as you use real money. Once you use ever-dropping and hugely inflated USD or EUR, all prices seem to rise. Seem is very important here because in fact they don't rise at all. What happens is that the measure we use - USD - is collapsing in value. It's like saying cars are faster and faster, but every year lowering value of meters in 1 km. I.e. this year 1 km is equal to 1,000 meters, next year it will be equal to 980 meters, and yet next year it will be 950 meters, so on. So in 2024, 1 km can be as little as 760 meters.

A lot of economic news or developments don't make sense unless you understand that we have lived in permanent inflationary times for the past 50 years.

Inflation isn't some magical unknown force. Every comparison of historical value includes inflation adjustment. Of course prices rise over time, of course currency devalues over time. Everyone is aware of that.

What is this 'real' money you speak of? You mean the relatively extremely volatile value of Gold and Silver? Did you even check a graph of the inflation-adjusted gold or silver price for the past 30 years? Here, I'll link you: http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/gold-and-silver-prices-100-y...

So is the 'true' value of gold $400 inflation-adjusted dollars or $1800 inflation-adjusted dollars?

I'm sorry, but your claims sound absurd. Do you have an economic background? What data are you basing that on?

I'm neither claiming expertise with oil or economics, but some cursory Google searches seem to strongly disagree with what you're claiming. Just taking from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_petroleum

Adjusted for inflation, our current oil prices appear to be equivalent to 1860s era prices, which places them at 4 - 5 times higher than they've been for the entire intervening period.

Not to mention oil prices being subsidized in the US, your claim that the "true cost" of oil hasn't risen seems totally nuts. Care to elaborate?

> The fuel price have been stagnant for the past 60 years. If you use real money, i.e. gold or silver.

Since most people would disagree that gold and silver are real money, the burden of proof is on your side. I think an equally compelling explanation for your observations can be built from the premise that gold in particular has been inflating an speculative bubble during the same time frame of 50+ years (or more precisely, that since about the 2nd half of 20 century gold price had been recovering from a previous drop in historic prices, and that a bubble has formed around that pattern and just began to inflate about ~10 years ago).

If on the other hand you consider the fact that petrol is a finite resource, and that the challenges to build a flying device powered by either nuclear energy, solar, wind or hydro, it is very likely that tourist class aviation will be in permanent decay from now on.

I think the capacity to fly is extremely valuable, so it will be preserved by nation states for as long as possible, mainly for military purposes, but also for the rapid transportation of diplomats and other high ranking officials. And if the technical capacity of flying is preserved in any way, the upper layers of civil society will find a way to buy their ways in as well (bringing back the original meaning of the term "jet set" as a side effect). But, mark my words... the days of regular, scheduled flights for the hoi polloi are numbered.

If we didn't have cheap petrol, we'd use nuclear, solar, wind, or hydro to produce somewhat-less-cheap ethanol.

It might be twice as expensive, but most people would still be able to fly.

Yes, I agree. That's why I believe we are not going to loose the technology to fly (at least within this century), unlike many people in the peak oil scene.

However, you have to consider the economic feasibility, not just the technical one. If you follow news about airlines, you will recall that they have gone through a series of hardships, raw times and infighting between different groups of stakeholders (unions vs companies). You can write it off as random incidents, or you can understand it under the lens of increased costs and multiple competitors trying to get each a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.

I have seen during my lifetime how conditions for the passengers have deteriorated. I recall as a teenager or a young adult, boarding a plane was a wonderful experience. Now a days, they treat you like cattle, and I am not just talking about the hardships imposed by TSA screenings (though they take a fair share of the blame).

If you add two plus two, you will find that this decreased passenger comfort is tied to cost cutting measures. But why to cut costs if you can simply pass those cost to the customer and keep the quality of service up? I do not presume to know the answer, but my intuition tell me that the leadership at airline companies have run the numbers and figured out that there is some sort of inflection point in the demand curve, and an increase in prices would cause a severe drop in usage.

Instead, a less bad alternative is to cut cost, punish quality, and face a small decrease in demand, but as long as the margin remains in the black the company can keep operating, and wait for better days. My fear comes mostly for the moment when airlines run out of comforts, and begin cutting cost in critical areas of operations such as plain maintenance. Even a modest number of non-fatal incidents may shift perceptions of safety and make the bottom of the bucket fall from under the demand pool.

Now that I think about it, this is a market ripe for disruption.

If the article was written with your perspective, the airlines would still save a lot of real money if they could find inventive ways to reduce weight, and therefore burn less fuel, irrelevant of the price of fuel.

This isn't true: gold prices have varied wildly relative to the price of the dollar.

For example, gold was at $1780/oz as of September 2012, and is now at $1326/oz, a difference of -34%. Prices for goods and services have not fallen 34%. On average the prices for consumer goods have increased by a few percent in dollar terms, so an ounce of gold will buy you less than 34% of what it would have two years ago.

Intelligent comparisons of prices are done with inflation-adjusted dollar values rather than gold-adjusted values for a reason.

Right, but most of our economy is controlled by the price of labor. How have prices compared to the median wage? How much fuel could an average worker buy in 1960 compared to today?

Shitting my pants and sharing odor that with the rest of the cabin will still be free, right?

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