683
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
683 points (96.7% liked)
Asklemmy
42472 readers
1246 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Airlines charging for seat selection. I remember the days when that was just a right you got for "free" by purchasing the ticket 🤷
Airlines charging for EVERYTHING including carry on.
Recently went on a flight and paid 30 USD for seat selection online. Then when we go to the airport our friends who didn't check in online could select it free at the airport anyways...
If you're flying as a family or with friends, some cheap airlines actually "randomly" puts your seats all across the airplane if you don't buy the seats.
Those things actually make flights cheaper by shifting the cost towards people that value those features. Same with bags, leg room, food, drinks etc.
Yeah, it's normal to pay extra for mothers to not be separated from their children ...
Frequent flyer for the last 20 years. It wasn't normal at all until a few years ago. You just validated this whole thread.
I meant "normal" as in "ethically acceptable". A widespread practice can still be immoral.
I think it is more a drip pricing scam to increase revenue for the airline, especially when it is for things that don't have an incremental cost for the airline. Can't compete with other airlines? No problem, advertise a lower price than your competitors, but then dream up things your competitor offers as included that almost ever customer wants (and perhaps even try to create problems for customers but charge to make them go away). Now you get customers in the door for the lower initial price, but almost all customers end up paying more than if they had just gone with the competitor.
It is not beneficial to the customer because it reduces the efficiency of the market (and hence competition) by making it harder to quickly compare prices and get the best overall offer.
Other industries do the same - insurers with exclusions, retailers trying to make warranties an optional extra (where regulations allow them to do it), ISPs trying to drip price extra charges.
If a business has absolute upfront honesty about all extra charges, but they genuinely have a reason to charge extra for some customers doing things that cost them significantly more, then that is a different matter, and not necessarily bad for their customers. But the second they try to conceal part of the price and progressively reveal it, it really is a form of scam.
You can still book flights with full service airlines like Turkish, Emirates, Swiss etc, but if you go for a cheap airline and take advantage of modern day cheap flight prices this is how the game works. In the future they'll even have more options probably.
Not saying it's ethical, nice or anything. This is just how modern low cost airlines make money.