Are you Kidding Me?

There are times when you run across a news story and just have to wonder if the author, or the company on which he or she is reporting, perhaps, are having a small practical joke on their readership. As I noted in our discussion of April Food’s jokes perpetuated by businesses, this sort of thing isn’t actually common, at least in the United States. Everyone like a good joke – almost everyone, at least – but very few people enjoy being made fun of by people who are also asking them for money in the form of consumer purchases, and even if they do it’s difficult to imagine anyone who would like this sort of practical joke enough to increase their consumption of the company’s product. But some people do insist on trying advertising of this type, and thus I had to look twice when I saw the story online about United Airlines putting smaller seats onto some of its aircraft…

You can pick up the original story off the Chicago Tribunewebsite if you want to, but basically what United is doing is re-configuring the seating on its CRJ regional aircraft to include an extra row of economy-class seats – in effect, adding 4 passengers to the capacity of each flight, or just over 6% more. They are doing that in part by introducing thinner seats – specifically, seat units with thinner backs and bottoms, although as far as I can tell, not any narrower than the existing seats on the CRJ models. The company insists that all of the seats (including the new ones) will have just as much legroom as ever; that the space savings in the thinner seats frees up enough room for an extra row of them, and further, that the new seats are light enough to make up for the weight of four extra passengers as well…

Now, if the company is telling the truth about the seat sizes – and there’s no reason they should try to make the seats any narrower, since there would still be no way they could fit an extra seat into each row – there shouldn’t be much effect on your personal experience in flying on one of their “upgraded” CRJ units. Flying on a CRJ is already a miserable experience if you are over 5’10” or weigh more than 200 pounds, but unless the new seats are less comfortable to sit in (which would be a real challenge in itself) I’m not sure why the average flyer would care. Unless you are actually sitting in the new last row of seats there shouldn’t even be much impact on how long it takes to board or deplane the aircraft. And it is possible that this is the move that all of the airlines have been looking for…

Consider that United is going to put this modification onto about 500 aircraft; if each airplane averages just two flights per day (allowing for maintenance and down time between flights) that’s 1,000 flights, or about 4,000 additional passengers – about 1.5 million additional customers per year. If each of those passengers is paying $100 for their tickets, that’s $150 million per year in additional revenue, supposedly without any increase in costs relating to salaries, advertising, aircraft depreciation or maintenance, or even fuel. The airline will literally be drawing more profit from each of its airplanes on each of its flights, rather than attempting to squeeze more money out of customers with an additional round of preposterous add-ons and infuriating service fees…

It remains to be seen if this new strategy will work, largely because it remains to be seen if the new seats are actually as comfortable to sit in, if the legroom and personal space are really unchanged, and if people react well to learning that their new seats are “thinner” than they were previously. But compared to slapping on new fees for breathing, sleeping or sneezing while on board, this concept looks like it might just work. Even if, on the face of it, the headline is enough to make you wonder if they’re kidding…