Tag Archives for seats.
If you take the window and aisle seat, and leave the middle empty, you run the risk that someone winds up sitting there. You don’t get any extra room. And as this fellow shows, sometimes the passenger won’t move.
Southwest Airlines doesn’t offer assigned seats, although that may be changing with a premium seat offering expected to be announced this fall.
In the meantime, even though they do not sell seat assignments, they still manage to earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their seats.
Once the plane takes off, and the middle seat in your row remains empty, does it now belong to you for the rest of the flight? That’s the question that a passenger wanted to know after a recent trip where they were called nasty names for trying to protect the space.
One of the better tricks to flying comfortably is when there are cheap tickets, just buy two. You often need to work with the airline (don’t just buy an extra seat in your own name, the airline might think it’s a duplicate). But you can usually buy more than one seat and sit in both. That’s more space for a lot less money than paying for business or first class.
A United Airlines passenger had a flight attendant kicked them out of their seat because another passenger had taken it, and the crewmember felt that woman deserved it more than they did.
When they arrived at their seat, in the second row from the back of the aircraft, they found a woman and two kids seated in the row. They offered, “I have the window seat, does your ticket say you also have my seat?”
People seem to get confused over whether they use the space under the seat in front of them, under their own seat, or both.
The man took the other aisle seat, the dad took the main’s aisle next to the kids. And… another passenger comes on board assigned to the aisle seat he’d moved to. It turns out the dad had the middle seat and lied to the man in order to get him to switch. The dad traded something he did not have in the first place.
Last week a passenger flew American Airlines from Miami to Atlanta. When they boarded flight 2290 on Friday they were told by a flight attendant that someone had urinated in seat 15C on the 12-year old Boeing 737.
An American Airlines passenger flying from Charlotte to Munich purchased a business class ticket that they say cost them $4,600. Once they boarded they discovered that their seat did not move. It did not recline. It did not turn into a bed. It was just a seat – not the thing they had purchased.
One of the more shocking things – beyond dirty seats – has been missing seat backs in first class, with seats taken out of service. The response from the airline (and some readers) has been that it’s better to fly planes in this condition than delay flights to address the problem. But I’ve always wondered, what are they doing when the planes aren’t flying to maintain the interiors so that this doesn’t happen so frequently?
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
