Swapping seats on planes: What's the etiquette?

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This was published 8 years ago

Swapping seats on planes: What's the etiquette?

By MARTHA C. WHITE
Passengers, choose your seats carefully: it's unlikely a passenger would be willing to switch.

Passengers, choose your seats carefully: it's unlikely a passenger would be willing to switch.Credit: iStock

JL Pomeroy has flown long enough to know that there are limits to how obliging she will be to her fellow passengers, especially those who want her seat.

"I always pretty much just say no," she said. She rarely gives her decision a second thought.

"I always pick a very specific seat for very specific reasons, and somebody's fleeting whim at the last minute isn't something I want to accommodate on a long flight," said Pomeroy, who runs a film and event production company.

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For passengers in increasingly stratified plane cabins, the scramble for the right seat has become more intense than ever.

Just asking to switch remains a popular choice, but increasingly, frequent travellers say fellow passengers are breaching long-established etiquette and simply plopping down in a seat of their choice.

"It's a little bit of they don't understand the value," said Joanna Bloor, a consultant. "It is truly lack of an awareness that this is a transaction."

Tom Nickerson has learned just how aggressive the commandeering of seats can be. When he boarded a small commuter jet, he saw a woman in his spot - a window seat with no aisle seat next to it.

"I just tell her that I think she's in my seat, and she basically says, 'Yup,'" Nickerson recalled. "She wanted to be on the single-seat side and so did I, obviously."

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Nickerson held firm, but as it turned out, the flight crew needed to shuffle around passengers to balance the weight distribution, and he found himself seated next to the woman, who seemed determined to make her displeasure known.

When an elbow first landed in his ribs, Nickerson figured his seatmate was still adjusting. But by the third - or maybe the fourth - jab, he had a hunch that the woman next to him was sending him a message.

"I mean, it's a 60-minute flight. There's no reason," he said. "I think she was looking for another fight but didn't want to be the instigator."

Turf wars over the limited real estate in a plane cabin, from the overhead bins to the armrests, have become more acute in recent years. And with airlines packing planes tighter and charging more for exit rows, for seats further up in the economy cabin or for seat selection at the time of booking, requests - or demands - to swap seats have taken on a new tenor.

"People know not all seats in the cabin are created equally," said John Thomas, head of the global aviation practice for LEK Consulting.

Carriers increasingly divide the cabin into smaller segments, more like the way seating in a theater or a sporting arena is priced. Industry experts say this is just giving customers what they want.

"Airlines are beginning to realise, 'Wait a minute, we can attach a monetary value to things, and why shouldn't we?' That's what we're in the world of now," said Jay Sorensen, president of IdeaWorksCompany, an airline consulting firm.

For the airlines' part, the greater stratification has brought more order to the cabin.

"Yes, the airline will make money out of it, but it's actually giving the customers greater control over their experience," Thomas said. "Our research shows that travel is stressful for most people, and the more ambiguity you can take out of the experience the better."

As a result, travellers who don't want to pay extra for a preferred seat might need to ask a fellow passenger to swap. But frequent travellers say that there is a definite etiquette to this activity that infrequent travellers often violate.

A request is more likely to be granted if the person who wants to swap is willing to move farther back in the cabin, or take a middle seat. Even so, asking is no guarantee.

"The problem is that a lot of these people have paid for these seats, or they've booked them far in advance and they don't want to give them up," said George Hobica, who runs the website Airfarewatchdog.

Pomeroy said she frequently saw fellow passengers helping themselves to seats a class above their assigned seat. "It's really unfair to the person who's in the seat who paid for it," she said. "It's quite a difference in fare."

Frequent travellers agree that flying provokes more anxiety today, although some say the increasing stratification exacerbates the situation.

"It's a capacity thing," Bloor said. "I have seen increased crankiness on this particular issue because of more tighter packed planes."

Others try to get a jump on reserving a preferred seat. When Darlene Marshall was flying home to Montreal last year, she got up early and drove to the local library, the closest place where she could access free Wi-Fi, to check in exactly 24 hours before her flight was scheduled to depart.

"I find if you don't Web-check early, the good seats are gone," Marshall said. "There's a shrinking and shrinking portion of seats that are for the taking on Web check."

For her trouble, Marshall said, she still had competition from her seatmate when she got on board and tried to take the seat she had booked.

"She was kind of really getting snippy," she said. The other passenger claimed she needed to sleep and couldn't do so in an aisle seat. "It was kind of embarrassing to do it in front of everybody."

The woman raised enough of a fuss that Marshall eventually relented, just as a flight attendant emerged and told the woman they had found another window seat for her.

"She said, 'No - I'm going to write a letter to the airline,'" Marshall recalled. "All I can think is, 'Oh my gosh, I'm sitting next to a big baby.'"

The New York Times

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