Six years ago I wrote about the brilliant idea for extra space on a plane, especially when tickets are cheap: most airlines will let you buy two seats instead of one. The process, though, is clunky and a little bit different for each carrier.
PlusGrade sells a product to airlines that both makes this much easier, and generates revenue. Their ‘Dynamic Seat Blocker’ adds the sale of an extra seat as a revenue item in the booking flow.
Frontier Airlines now sells this extra seat as an upgraded seating product. You get extra legroom at the front of the plane, and can buy a seat up there with the middle blocked. And the best thing for them is that they sell this middle seat twice – to the passenger in the window and at the aisle!
What I didn’t realize is that United Airlines makes it easy to do this, too. I really do love most things about United’s technology – such a far cry from a decade ago.
Extra Seat for “Personal Comfort”
byu/PurplestPanda inunitedairlines
United lays this out on their ‘seating accommodation’ page, where they talk about it in terms of passengers of size needing more space, but their systems actually offers the option of explaining it’s just for your own convenience or preference.
You’ll even earn miles for buying the extra seat, but not elite qualifying credit (as that’s supposed to be only for the seat in which you fly).
Do I earn miles for my extra seat if I’m a MileagePlus member?
If you buy an extra seat on a United or United Express® flight, you’ll earn miles for both seats. However, you won’t earn Premier® qualifying miles or points for the extra seat. Miles earned for the extra seat will be labeled as “Extra Seat Credit” in your MileagePlus account.
Sometimes, though, the extra seat can get mucked up and a gate agent might give it away to someone on standby.
- Some gate agents just don’t believe you should do this. They go rogue. They believe it’s only for oversized passengers, and see that you aren’t one. And they believe that, morally, space on the plane ought to be used to transport as many passengers as possible.
- More likely, though, the process just gets confused. They need to show the seat as unassigned prior to doors close – their passenger count needs to be accurate.
- If this is done too early they might mix things up, see an empty seat, and clear a standby passenger onto the plane in error. And then you’re probably not going to get that person offloaded once they’ve boarded (for David Dao reasons), and it’ll also be cumbersome working with customer service to get the extra seat refunded too.
Up until 2007 United Airlines used to block middle seats for all elite frequent flyers, only filling them on full flights. They ended the benefit when planes were regularly full, because the number of seats having to be assigned at the gate was unwieldy. Technology today makes this much easier to manage and it would be a benefit I’d really like to see return.
Ultimately 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.
So then you check in for both seats and then no-show at the gate for the second seat? Isn’t there still a risk that the airline will give that seat away to a standby pax when they see they are not full prior to closing out the flight?
Smart move and a good value. Therefore Delta won’t offer it.
I have bought an extra seat for comfort several times. They should come with a slight discount at a minimum because you don’t get the luggage allowance on the extra seat, neither carry-on nor personal item nor any free checked bags. If you are paying full price you should get the whole bundle. On Singapore Airlines I got a slight discount but it was long wait times on the phone to put the deal together. On JetBlue there was no discount but the online purchase and setting up the seats was very easy. I always use part of my extra seat by sitting somewhat sideways to give my knees a bit more room. If the airline was to sell the same seat to two people it could end up with conflict if both people wanted to put some of their things there or even sleep partially in the extra seat, a seat that they each fully paid for. I suppose you could insist on both armrests in an extra seat in the middle (sarcasm.) You could even take the middle seat to sit in and keep the one next to it that you had bought, open.