Voila! You’re done booking cheap flight tickets for your upcoming travel. The dollars you saved by paying the lowest fares for flights to India from USA will go into alleviating your fears of being seated away from your elderly parents or young kids on board. Yes, some airlines cash in on advance/pre-boarding seat assignment to family travelers, which along with charges for selection of preferred seats and seats with extra legroom, forms a disproportionate percentage of their revenue.
“Seats are real estate, and real estate on an airplane is a very precious commodity,” said Jay Sorensen, a leading aviation consultant, to CBS News. Major airlines use a heat map to monetize the seat selection process until boarding, according to him. In one of his blog posts, “Family Separation: It is an airline problem, too,” consumer advocate Charles Leocha described airlines’ unfair, revenue-generating practice of splitting up families on board as the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
He argues that sitting side-by-side and traveling together on a flight within the United States could cost a family of four up to additional $800. Seat reservation fee is the second biggest source of ancillary revenue for airlines, which jumped to $92 billion in 2018 from $82.2 billion in 2017 globally.
At times, airlines reserve seats for free as one of the perks of booking business class flight tickets for premium passengers.
In 2016, the US Congress passed a law for airlines to make family travelers sit with their kids under the age of 14, without levying additional fees for seat assignment to them. But, enforcement of the law by the US Department of Transportation is said to be a failure. That’s why the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports has launched an online petition to collect signatures urging major US airlines to make families sit together on planes. The petition titled “Airlines: Kids should sit with their parents” has garnered 118,000 signatures so far.
The argument of the petition reads: “American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines all charge big fees for families to sit together. And in some cases, they knowingly separate kids from their parents on board – even 2-year-olds! This is a security hazard for the child and a safety threat to all passengers during emergencies. It also puts an inappropriate burden on customers who sit next to an unaccompanied child. Airlines can easily fix this, but they haven’t. Doing so would mean giving up millions of dollars in fees from parents who simply want to keep their kids safe.”
Consumer Reports has reviewed over 400 complaints against US airlines which are said to have separated children as young as 2 years old from their families on board. But, the Department of Transportation took little action to enforce the 2016 federal legislation given the small number of complaints about additional seat selection fees.
One of the complaints that Consumer Reports received and reviewed came from a passenger whose family of four, including a 2-year-old and an 8-month-old, were seated away from each other in different rows on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Florida. In another complaint, a passenger reported that American Airlines tried to make him sit away from his three children under the age of 8 on a flight from Dallas to Florida.
The Department of Transportation’s Family Seating Tips:
The US Department of Transportation requires travelers to understand operating airlines’ family seating policies before or during booking flight tickets. They should collect as much information as possible about an airline’s family seating policies. In case the information is not available on the airline’s website, they can contact the airline and request the same. Details of individual airlines’ family seating policies may not be available with online travel agencies.
Rules of airline tickets vary depending on various factors. Hence, the Department of Transportation requires travelers to check whether flight tickets they buy from air-ticketing agencies including IndianEagle.com, do allow them to reserve seats. For instance, basic economy flight tickets cost lesser than standard economy airfares, and hence, pre-boarding seat selection may not be available in case of basic economy travel.
Travelers are required to contact their airlines and confirm the seats assigned to them before they show up at the airport for a scheduled flight. At times, airlines do not deliver confirmed seat assignments owing to a change of aircraft with a different seating arrangement. Travelers having faced a problem with family seating during their flight may complain to the Department of Transportation or the airline.
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