Airlines ponder new normal of flying with no middle seat
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Airlines including United, Delta, EasyJet and others have announced plans to do away with the middle seat in their economy class cabins during the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest move in the aviation industry’s attempts to deal with the coronavirus, which has walloped this industry harder than perhaps any other.
United Airlines announced on Wednesday that it has started limiting seat selection for adjacent seats in all of its cabins, “including middle seats where available and alternating window and aisle seats when seats are in pairs.”
In addition to getting rid of middle seats, the airline says it has started to board passengers in smaller groups at a time, in order to discourage them from clustering together, and has also started to upgrade more passengers into business and first class seats in order to keep minimum distances.
The airline says the practice will be in effect until the end of May. It comes on the heels of Delta announcing an outright halt on booking middle seats on its flights, which the airline says will be in effect until at least the end of June.
Irish discount airline RyanAir is able to offer rock-bottom prices precisely because they cram in as many passengers as possible, and CEO Michael O’Leary said the idea of keeping middle seats permanently empty is “nonsense.”
“We’re in dialogue with regulators who are sitting in their bedrooms inventing restrictions such as taking out the middle seats, which is just nonsense,” O’Leary said. “It would have no beneficial effect whatsoever.”
IATA head Alexandre de Juniac said it was not a sustainable solution unless companies increase their prices to the point where air travel would be impossible for most people, and make air travel once again a pursuit solely for the world’s richest people.
“If you neutralize … one-third of the seats, it means that you will have to increase your fares by 50 per cent at least,” he said.
“So, in terms of what travel represents in our societies, it means that cheap travel is over … Is it what we want to do? I’m not sure.”
