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All Passengers Not Created Equal
The Travel Critic · May 10, 2000

The gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is widening in the air, and the circumstances are enough to confuse even Karl Marx.

Listen to what the carriers are saying, and you'd think the skies are becoming more egalitarian. American Airlines claims its new steerage seats have "more class." United Airlines insists it's won a "race for space" in the back of the plane. Startup JetBlue Airways says its larger leather seats will "bring humanity back to air travel."

Yet flying remains a very uncomfortable ordeal for a majority of passengers. What's going on?

The airlines - with one notable exception, American - are simultaneously giving us more legroom and taking it away. Late last year United Airlines carved a new "Economy Plus" section out of its cabins, creating a hybrid of business class and economy. The new service offered more legroom but no more width. British Airways is expected to follow this fall when it installs a similar section called "World Traveler Plus" on its trans-Atlantic fleet. Continental Airlines and Singapore Airlines are thought to be considering similar moves.

At the same time, the seats in the back of the plane, where most passengers sit, are wedged together as tightly as ever. In effect, the airlines are feeding us the kind of rhetoric worthy of George Orwell's 1945 book "Animal Farm."

Equality not a guarantee "All passengers are created equal," is the message. "But some passengers are more equal than others."

United-watcher Jeremy Cooperstock, who runs the Web site Untied.com, admits that the move makes some business sense for airlines. The new classes are meant to set the full-fare business travelers, who paid thousands of dollars for an unrestricted coach class ticket, apart from tourists who spent a few hundred bucks for the same seat. But the strategy could eventually crash and burn, he warns.

"When you're a business traveler and you pay full fare for your economy-class seat, you don't want to sit in the back with the passengers who paid a few hundred dollars for their ticket," he says. "But what if you can't get upgraded into one of the new seats?"

Carriers aren't entirely to blame for this class confusion. Corporate travel managers, the folks who manage travel for large companies, have been pressuring airlines to install the new sections. Many new travel policies forbid executives from flying in business class and, of course, first class. But the suits also don't want to get stuck next to screaming toddlers on their way to Disney World, either.

"It's a little ridiculous," says Az Hatefi, publisher of Aircraft Interiors magazine. "Airlines are playing with words, they're playing with classes, and I think it's going to throw passengers for a loop."

The four-class segmentation of the aircraft cabins will be short-lived, Hatefi believes. On most flights, there are already two groups of disgruntled passengers - those who couldn't upgrade to first and those who couldn't upgrade to business. Add a third group of irate passengers and the outcry could be deafening. "They'll go back to a two- or three-class configuration again," he predicts.

Two years ago I suggested tearing out the oversized seats and spacing the economy class seats farther apart. Readers accused me of either being a communist or a Democrat for suggesting that airlines treat all of their passengers with respect, as opposed to coddling the select few with enough miles to upgrade.

Maybe the airline industry should get smart and eliminate the class system entirely - something I'm sure Marx not only would have understood, but approved, as well.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.