News and notes from around the interweb:
- Southwest Airlines seat saving etiquette: “It is OK to save seats, but not prime seats. That is, it’s OK to save seats to keep a group together, but not OK to save seats to get your friends nicer seats.”
- CitizenM hotels has a paid premium program, $12/mo ($144/year) gets you 15% off room rates, late checkout and premium view (subject to availability) and 10% off food and beverage outside of breakfast. They have a status match offer for $39.95 for a year, potentially worth it even with just a single night at one of their hotels, that is open to anyone with any status at any airline or any hotel in the world.
- Simon Malls Amex now offers 5% back at all Simon merchants, while other spend is down to 1% from 1.5%. (Gift cards still excluded, $10,000 spend cap remains for the 5%.)
- Airbus sounds the death knell for pivot overhead bins on its single-aisle jets
- United brings back bread baskets to international business class
- U.S. Territory Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands asks DOT to restore Open Skies with China
Is the bread basket Polaris 2.0? What happened to the big announcement?
If I get on and there isn’t someone sat in the exit row your stuff is moving. Period.
Yikeee glad I checked the link – pls don’t like to Wash Examiner/stormfront/Federalist/InfoWars/etc. Basic decency, but also a lot of us visit this site on work equipment! Or at a minimum warn with this sort of thing
*link
It is ok to not fly southwest due to their highly stressful and conflict inducing boarding process
It’s not OK to save seats on Southwest for more than say 1 minute. The people you are flying with should be in nearly the same boarding position so getting on the plane within a few moments of you. It is also not OK for one person in your party to buy up to early boarding and then plan to save seats for the entire group. This devalues the other people who bought up to early boarding.
Imagine you are so cheap that your family is C10, C11, and C12 because you are cheap or plan poorly but you buy up to A16. So the people who bought up to A17-B30 all lost value because you are taking 3 seats out of inventory that they could choose freely without some argument from you. Airline seats are a perishable item. This doesn’t even mention that people who put more effort or had earned status to be on the plane at C9 or lower but you cheated them out of that as well.
I won’t even go into preboarding as we all know the 20 wheelchair fakers per plane that do this that are even worse.
If someone saves a seat that i want, too bad too sad. Their did l stuff is being moved.
LUV to play the reserved seat game on SW.
I will point my finger across their face and say in an elevated voice: “Is someone sitting there!?!?”
I’ve gotten moans, groans, grimace, and the Evil Eye….especially on exit row seats.
That why I avoid SW unless it’s the only convenient flight which is not always the cheapest.
Otherwise, I fly airlines with assigned seating.
We only save seats when traveling with our children. It ensures our family of 6 will take up exactly 2 rows, and minimizes the delays of getting on at different times, shuffling around, asking/begging people to move or “trade”, etc. As the middle seats are undesirable we’re only actually saving 3 “desirable” seats and in some ways you could say we’re removing 2 “undesirable rows” (rows where every seat is taken and nobody has the open extra seat next to them).
Simple solution–require EVERYONE on the booking to purchase Early Bird.