In my experience, paying for the extra seat room often gives you a seat that doesn’t actually have more legroom, or actually have less (!!) legroom. when the payment is so disconnected from the actual experience, it becomes useless as a signal.
Exactly. The worst transatlantic flight I ever had was one where I paid for “extra legroom”. turns out it was a seat without a seat in front, i.e., the hallway got broader there.
However, other passengers and even the flight attendants certainly didn’t act like this extra legroom belonged to me. Someone even stepped on my foot! On top of that I had to use an extremely flimsy table that folded out of the armrest.
Since most of us aren’t weekly business flyers, this is a far cry from a free market.
This is related to something I’ve often pointed out: the reason why airline customers won’t pay money for better service or amenities is that prices are hard to hide, and quality of service is easy to hide.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane. Or even on a spec sheet, since airplane seats aren’t just randomly bolted wherever based on gut feel. The real issue is duplicity in the sales process as Vitor mentioned.
Case in point many airlines such as Air Canada are getting rid of several rows of economy seats on all their wide-body planes for premium economy seating, where the difference is large enough to be noticeable by everyone. And Air Canada is pretty sizeable so if 15% of their customers are willing to pay for it, and assuming half are private travellers and half are businesses downgrading from business class, then that suggests there’s sold demand among roughly 7.5% of their customer base. This suggests the vast majority of the remainder only complain in words not via their wallets.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
I think it is, and the post I was replying to showed an example of that. Sure, if you personally experience “the extra legroom was only because of space that the crew and passengers were encouraged not to treat as mine”, you know about it. But it’s certainly not mentioned if you go to the airline’s web site and get told that the seat has extra legroom. Any airline policies about how the crew is permitted to use the room, and how the crew should let passengers walk into it, won’t be advertised, or even written down. And it’s impractical for consumers to coordinate enough that an airline policy of treating their extra legroom seats this way becomes widely known.
Well the extra legroom wasn’t hidden in Vitor’s example, it just wasn’t as much as the full aisle, since the full aisle is not meant for the exclusive use of the passengers behind it even though the pictures and maybe even the wording would suggest that, especially for those unaware of legal requirements or airline policy. But that’s standard practice on every airline as far as I know. Once someone has experienced that once there’s no need to coordinate anything because it’s not like any airline in the future will actually give over an aisle for exclusive use as legroom.
It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse,
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
In my experience, paying for the extra seat room often gives you a seat that doesn’t actually have more legroom, or actually have less (!!) legroom. when the payment is so disconnected from the actual experience, it becomes useless as a signal.
Exactly. The worst transatlantic flight I ever had was one where I paid for “extra legroom”. turns out it was a seat without a seat in front, i.e., the hallway got broader there.
However, other passengers and even the flight attendants certainly didn’t act like this extra legroom belonged to me. Someone even stepped on my foot! On top of that I had to use an extremely flimsy table that folded out of the armrest.
Since most of us aren’t weekly business flyers, this is a far cry from a free market.
This is related to something I’ve often pointed out: the reason why airline customers won’t pay money for better service or amenities is that prices are hard to hide, and quality of service is easy to hide.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane. Or even on a spec sheet, since airplane seats aren’t just randomly bolted wherever based on gut feel. The real issue is duplicity in the sales process as Vitor mentioned.
Case in point many airlines such as Air Canada are getting rid of several rows of economy seats on all their wide-body planes for premium economy seating, where the difference is large enough to be noticeable by everyone. And Air Canada is pretty sizeable so if 15% of their customers are willing to pay for it, and assuming half are private travellers and half are businesses downgrading from business class, then that suggests there’s sold demand among roughly 7.5% of their customer base. This suggests the vast majority of the remainder only complain in words not via their wallets.
I think it is, and the post I was replying to showed an example of that. Sure, if you personally experience “the extra legroom was only because of space that the crew and passengers were encouraged not to treat as mine”, you know about it. But it’s certainly not mentioned if you go to the airline’s web site and get told that the seat has extra legroom. Any airline policies about how the crew is permitted to use the room, and how the crew should let passengers walk into it, won’t be advertised, or even written down. And it’s impractical for consumers to coordinate enough that an airline policy of treating their extra legroom seats this way becomes widely known.
Well the extra legroom wasn’t hidden in Vitor’s example, it just wasn’t as much as the full aisle, since the full aisle is not meant for the exclusive use of the passengers behind it even though the pictures and maybe even the wording would suggest that, especially for those unaware of legal requirements or airline policy. But that’s standard practice on every airline as far as I know. Once someone has experienced that once there’s no need to coordinate anything because it’s not like any airline in the future will actually give over an aisle for exclusive use as legroom.
It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
All I said about coordination is that it’s impractical!
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.