What is wrong with only wanting to pay for the services which you consume?
I want to fly in a bigger seat, with checked luggage and a carry-on, eat, and have an alcoholic beverage or two. If someone wants to be on the same place with a single bag, the smallest seat, and not eat or drink, they should absolutely have a much cheaper experience than me.
That's not classism, it's common sense. I shouldn't get free drinks at their expense.
One problem is that the airlines are both unbundling services AND using price discrimination to nickle and dime people. The extra services are marked up with crazy margins.
The people paying these fees are actually subsidizing the person who pay the vanilla fare.
It costs essentially nothing for the airline to let me pick a seat, but they now want 20 dollars a flight to do it.
If you wanted to refine loss of revenue as a cost, you'd have to account for how many actually pay it. If 10% of the flight pays the seat tool, it only costs 2 bucks, not 20.
Nothing wrong at all if it was really working that way, i.e. that someone would really get a cheaper price than a normal package. The article does make a point that it's not really what is happening, instead the companies are squeezing the money out of customers in any way they can.
In the end everyone wants to make money, but at certain point it starts bordering on unethical, this squeezing of money out of customers. I am pointing out that if one spins these practices in a certain way, one can even get the customers to support the initiatives which are not in their interests.
> the companies are squeezing the money out of customers in any way they can.
Or: "the companies are pricing competitively while maintaining a profit. Take a look at Southwest's profit margin.[0] 7-10% is nothing, especially when you look at the huge maintenance and regulatory costs surrounding commercial carriers. At 7% an unexpectedly bad month could be disastrous. I mean look at the margins moving into the 10th anniversary of 9/11. From 3.9% profit to 3.3% loss.
> I am pointing out that if one spins these practices in a certain way, one can even get the customers to support the initiatives which are not in their interests.
It's in my interest to get everything for free but that's not realistic, is it?
You're acting like the airlines are a dark cabal of billionaires trying to trick passengers into giving away money for nothing in return. It's totally within their right to raise prices for whatever reason they want, and it's totally within passengers' rights to shop elsewhere. There are a lot of carriers at every point on the price spectrum.
Except the airlines use a geographic hub system, so outside of (let's generously pick a large number) a dozen large cities you do NOT have the freedom to pick from a large set of carriers that go to the places you're trying to go. Much more the case if your time sensitivities eliminate layovers.
I did a ton of travel in my 20s out of Denver, where I was a United frequent flyer. In my experience they have one of the smallest seat pitches in the industry, which even though I'm 6'4" didn't matter much at the time due to the free upgrades, but when I started travelling less, I simply didn't have a lot of freedom to just go to American on a whim.
I want to fly in a bigger seat, with checked luggage and a carry-on, eat, and have an alcoholic beverage or two. If someone wants to be on the same place with a single bag, the smallest seat, and not eat or drink, they should absolutely have a much cheaper experience than me.
That's not classism, it's common sense. I shouldn't get free drinks at their expense.