If you want to sit together with your children on a plane, common sense says you have two options: Pay a premium for buying good seats next to one another, or grab the very worst rows, which will hopefully continue to be free at the time of purchase.
Some airlines in recent years have made that latter choice unavailable: If you’re going to buy the cheapest tickets, you don’t get to choose where you sit at all, and so reserving the three or five worst seats together is not an option. That means that a budget-conscious family, which may not care where it sits as long as they all sit together, ends up paying a premium for seats or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats — which sometimes goes awry.
On social media, “family separation” on airlines has become a thing, and so President Joe Biden, in an election year, is intervening.
On one hand, Biden is right that all airlines ought to accommodate families in this regard. America has gone too far in the direction of individualism and is now family-unfriendly, which is why we have record-low rates of marriage and birth rates.
Accommodating families by allowing them to pick cheap seats in a block (assuming there are pairs or whole rows of seats available) is not costly to airlines, nor does it inconvenience other customers. An uncharitable interpretation is that airlines realized that families valued sitting together, and so they would deliberately split them up unless the families paid to be kept together.
Customers disliked this, and on most routes, customers have choices. So airlines that didn’t want to alienate customers changed their policies.
United Airlines announced a new “family seating policy” one year ago, making it easier for children under 12 to sit with their families. American Airlines followed a week later with an even more comprehensive plan. As summarized by travel writer Gary Leff:
“They ask you to book everyone in the same reservation, but still offer to have reservations noted if they are separate.
“You can choose seats together or skip seat selection if only paid options are available and you don’t want to pay. Even Basic Economy passengers without seat assignments will have seats assigned together if traveling as a family. (If there aren’t seats available for the entire party to sit together, they’ll ensure at least one adult is next to children under 15 on the reservation.)”
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Southwest Airlines was already doing this — the company has a family seating period that basically allows families to grab a whole row in the back of the plane.
If airlines are accommodating families of their own accord, it’s hard to argue that regulation is needed for the protection of consumers. In this light, regulation looks like simple election-year politics.
