Preferred seat surcharges are a big moneymaker for airlines. At times, these charges are actually as much, or more, than the fare itself. This clearly helps with profits.
While not a scientific study, more and more I’m seeing and hearing from clients that these fees have an unintended consequence — delayed flights.
Basically, with an increasing number of seats being designated as preferred, it’s harder and harder for bargain hunters to get seats in advance. Any seats in advance.
Some airlines, like British Airways and Lufthansa, don’t give advance seat assignments to most travelers on discount fares. (Unless they are elite status, or in the case of British Airways, booked through a preferred travel agency.) They do, however, allow passengers to select seats online 23-24 hours in advance.
Then there’s Southwest. It is sticking to its boarding groups and boarding numbers, and it has the system down pretty well. Legacy carriers, however, who may have started out selling just a few exit row seats, now have a no-man’s land system, where they theoretically offer seats for free, but not that many of them.
On an American flight I checked today, out of 23 rows in coach, exactly five rows were designated as having “free” pre-assignable seats.
At the time of writing, I have more than a dozen travelers in the next couple weeks on my internal seat assignment search list. They all booked transcontinental flights with a week to over a month’s advance notice, but there were zero pre-assignable, free seats available, only surcharged seats.
Often, I can find seats as other passengers change or cancel. But, even with checking at least once a day, that is not always possible.
In most cases, there are surcharged seats available. However, many travelers don’t want to pay an extra fee for a seat, period. And, they either don’t have a travel agent checking or don’t want to waste their own time. So they wait. Then, if there are no seats available at check-in, they wait at the gate.
Some carriers open up most seats for online check-in 24 hours before the flight. Others try to sell them up until the last minute. The result — at the airport on most of my recent flights there were large numbers of people at the gate waiting for seat assignments.
The problem for the gate agents and the flight attendants is they spend too much time trying to sort out seats. And then once passengers board, those who have tried not to pay a surcharge are often separated, resulting in the airline version of musical chairs, often with a heavy dose of guilt trip, especially when families are involved.
A client on a recent flight from D.C. said his flight was delayed 10-15 minutes over a family of five trying to talk passengers into moving around to accommodate them.
Even with solo travelers, it takes time to assign seats, and then to deal with the inevitable question from many passengers, “Don’t you have anything better?”
In addition, last-minute seat assignments mean that passengers in those seats often can’t board with their logical boarding group, resulting in full overhead bins and further delays for the reverse Jenga game of trying to fit them in. (Kudos again to those gate agents who actually insist late boarders with large carry-on bags gate check them.)
My sense is that airlines have done the math and decided the gate and boarding issues are more than offset by extra seat revenue. Or, maybe not. There are many services that have been reduced or taken away in the industry. Fees, on the other hand, just go up and up.
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
