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US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

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Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#381

Post by havaloc »

bradley13 wrote: post #308

I agree that transparency is important. All charges known up front. That said, I think a fundamental problem is that sir travel is too cheap. That's the motivation behind all the nutty fees. Surely there would be a market for an airline (or a class of seating) where you get a decent seat, with no gimmicks and up-charges? And not for triple the price like business class?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Airlines

"For many years, all flights featured 2-by-2 leather seating (in aircraft usually fitted with 3-2 seating), ample legroom, complimentary gourmet meals, and warm chocolate chip cookies. This made the airline popular with business travelers. In addition, Midwest Express operated a sizable executive charter operation with a specially configured DC-9."

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#382

Post by hn8726 »

octo888 wrote: post #304
geff82 wrote: post #222

Book trips from European websites in the future. Prices here need to include everything upfront. Which might lead to situations where you reserve a hotel room in the USA for 1500, but then only pay 1200 at checkout because the remaining 300 are the "resort fee" that will be paid at the hotel. Or take car rental: the cheaper, more complete packages for the USA are often booked in the EU at at better price.

> Prices here need to include everything upfront How are you defining "everything" and "upfront"? Upfront as in the first page shown after searching? Because many, many airlines/car rental sites have a complex muti-step process of different fares, extras etc until you get to the final stage

Can you give an example? I just checked a random rental website for France and I got a very clear `From $xx` price and I could — in one step — go to checkout with that exact price by simply not selecting any other options.

Sure you will have upsells but if a price for a service is presented, that should be a final price. You can't tack on "resort fees", the price presented must be inclusive of all the required charges. For example as much as I dislike Booking.com, the price they show for a room includes everything — tax, mandatory cleaning fee and city tax if applicable.

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#383

Post by terminalshort »

proggy wrote: post #297
egonschiele wrote: post #130

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another. This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.

This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in pl…

I have to pay more to select the exact seats I want on a plane, so why shouldn't you?

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#384

Post by cyral »

cdrini wrote: post #26
eadmund wrote: post #17

> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations Does this mean when the passenger cancels or when the airline cancels? If it’s when the passenger chooses to cancel, this seems fine and fair: he paid for a flight; he chose not to take it. If it’s the latter, then it seems very unfair. > Transparency of Fees This seems patently unfair. Folks should know what they’re going to be paying ahead of time. > Family Sea…

> [Elimination of] Automatic Refunds for Cancellations Airline cancellations. Seeing as they're talking about making a change, I assume it's airline cancellations, since no airline will currently refund you for a passenger cancellation.

If the flight is delayed by 3 hours, you will get a refund if you cancel. This is great if the delay is long and there is a flight on a competing airline that would let you get out sooner.

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#385

Post by mothballed »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #355
euleriancon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.

And? They are your kids. Why should someone who has paid to reserve their seat have to move because you were to cheap to pay to choose your seat. Also see, I’m not going to work extra hours because a parent can’t work late. Just because I have grown children doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life outside of work.

Ah yes I love modern society "they're your kids" until every busybody on earth calls CPS or police at the first sign of doing something they disapprove (happened to me because I shit you not, my kid is a different race and that was 'suspicious' to be a kidnapping -- thanks FOIA for the bodycam revealing that bullshit).

Or when it comes time to tax the shit out of the grown kid made possible by the massive time and money investment made by the parents, the lion's share of the total. "No no no, that was society's investment -- now they owe us those taxes as part the social contract!"

When it comes time to do the gangster shit it's all on the parent, but when it comes time to reap the benefits suddenly "we're a society."

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#386

Post by mkipper »

izacus wrote: post #41
bsimpson wrote: post #32

I'd be curious to see how the all-in price of airline tickets has evolved in recent decades. It feels like it's now commonplace to have hundreds of dollars in additional fees for things like legroom. That means a cheap ticket is a midrange ticket and a midrange ticket can end up being quite expensive unless you fall for the "we get to strap you behind the bathroom with only the clothes on your back" Saver ticket. It…

Hundreds of dollars for legroom? Are you... sure? For what kind of flights?

I'm 6'6" and I basically treat an exit row upgrade as non-negotiable. It's just a fundamental cost of long haul travel for me if I can't swing premium economy or business class.

To get some extra legroom, I paid (round trip, in CAD) $250 for a trip to Dublin this year and $320 for a trip to Hong Kong in 2023. That's a lot of money, but it was This used to be much cheaper. I remember paying ~$100 for similar upgrades a decade ago, but airlines got wise to this at some point and jacked the prices way up.

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#387

Post by googlywoogly »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #312
googlywoogly wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right wing very vocally and openly calls for votes every election. In countries like the US and Canada voting is very obviously a scam - you get to vote for a few preselected candidates, and what determines the winner is actually the media and special interests who decide how much and what kind of coverage a candidate gets. Then, after the election, whoever wins just serves the special interests and is free to go…

Perhaps the GP comment was too US centric, but in the context of US politics, you can't really both-sides this argument or say that the right-wing are the champions of free and fair elections. The Republican party is by far the leader in voter suppression tactics, including closing polling places; restricting or banning mail-in or absentee voting; restricting who is allowed to vote; calling for partisan election obse…

> you can't really both-sides this argument or say that the right-wing are the champions of free and fair elections.

Those are like two opposite statements, and I think you missed the whole point of my comment. You think you're in some noble partisan fight where your side are the good guys. In reality both sides work closely together to maximally fuck you over, while your cheer one of them on for some reason.

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#388

Post by hansvm »

unglaublich wrote: post #340
euleriancon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.

Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with. Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.

> must reserve

With the current implementation exposed to the end customer, yes, that's required. Reserving specific seats isn't fundamental to the constraint that some people want to sit together.

Plus, the current reservation system is predatory in its own right. When booking you're dumped into a page strongly suggesting you must choose a seat, and all available options cost more than the base ticket.

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#389

Post by tavavex »

realusername wrote: post #354
Lio wrote: post #318

> Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. This is wild. Are they really asking to be able to take money for a flight, then cacel it and keep the money? That's crazy.

I mean, why even bother to run flights at all in this scenario? They could cancel 80% of flights and keep the rest to pretend they are still an airline. Cancelations would be more profitable than the flights themselves.

80% would be way too much, the consumers would catch on and probably not buy tickets anymore. But don't worry, the airlines' best MBAs will be hard at work calculating the exact percentage of flights they have to fly before it starts hurting the bottom line. And once all airlines start doing it, they could bring that percentage down - what are the consumers gonna do if that's the only way to get to the destination?

Re: US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

#390

Post by rpcope1 »

Lio wrote: post #318

> Airlines want to remove the requirement to provide automatic refunds when flights are cancelled or significantly altered. This is wild. Are they really asking to be able to take money for a flight, then cacel it and keep the money? That's crazy.

Airlines are basically as stupid and greedy as telcos. If it were up to them, GA aircraft, UAVs, model aircraft and basically anything that wasn't military or an airliner would be banned. It has strong analogs in telcos swallowing up large amounts of spectrum "cause muh 5 gee" and just squatting on it. I'm sure safety would be in the shitter too if the FAA was less watchful (not to say it's sufficiently aggressive on the big players today).
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