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Airlines Face Crack Down on Use of 'Exploitative' Algorithm That Splits Up Families on Flights (independent.co.uk) 223

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Algorithms used by airlines to split up those travelling together unless they pay more to sit next to each other have been called "exploitative" by a government minister. From a report: Speaking to a parliamentary communications committee, Digital Minister Margot James described the software as "a very cynical, exploitative means... to hoodwink the general public." She added: "Some airlines have set an algorithm to identify passengers of the same surname travelling together. They've had the temerity to split the passengers up, and when the family want to travel together they are charged more." It's an issue that will be looked at by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, launched by the government this week to identify and address areas where clearer guidelines and regulation are needed in how data is used. Passengers first started noticing they were being split up from their party if they didn't pay more for allocated seating in June 2017, with Ryanair most commonly associated with the practice.
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Airlines Face Crack Down on Use of 'Exploitative' Algorithm That Splits Up Families on Flights More

Airlines Face Crack Down on Use of 'Exploitative' Algorithm That Splits Up Families on Flights

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  • Southwest cattle call (Score:5, Interesting)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:04PM (#57701534)
    Make airline boarding more like the old Southwest system or like a commuter train. Board handicapped people first. Other than that, those who show up earlier get to board first and pick seats first.

    • Re:Southwest cattle call (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:12PM (#57701578)

      Not at all. I love how Delta lets me escape the children. Let other people deal with them for 2 hours. Their cost in lost sales on the next flight is a whole lot more than the potential revenue from their extortion.

    • Re:Southwest cattle call (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:18PM (#57701636) Homepage Journal

      That would make it worse. People would leave 1 seat gaps between them and the next person, and then when families and couples come along later they would have to ask them to move or be split up.

      Particularly for families with children being together is quite important, and benefits the other passengers as well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Octorian ( 14086 )

        That would make it worse. People would leave 1 seat gaps between them and the next person, and then when families and couples come along later they would have to ask them to move or be split up.

        Particularly for families with children being together is quite important, and benefits the other passengers as well.

        This is exactly what happens with Southwest, and why I pretty much avoid flying on that airline when not traveling by myself. Just trying to sit next to my wife (before children) was enough of a hassle, if we weren't lucky enough to get on-board first.

    • Make airline boarding more like the old Southwest system

      I like SWA's open seating, and agree that it speeds up boarding.

      But I know several people who hate that system and refuse to fly on SWA for that reason.

      • Re:Southwest cattle call (Score:5, Informative)

        by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:44PM (#57701828)
        I've flown both regularly and there's interesting trade-offs to both systems. Both encourage you to pay more for a better seat - either with early bird boarding on SWA or pay for a seat selection. SWA has only the "one class" of seating whereas other airlines like Delta have first class and now "comfort" seating classes which require additional upcharges along with the seat choice upcharge. (Although it gets further complicated because the seat selection may be included in the price of the ticket depending on what ticket class you purchase.
        With Delta I discovered it made no sense for me to be at the boarding gate until I got the text that boarding had begun because a> my seat was always going to be there and b> boarding is stupidly slow so being at the gate ahead of time meant standing in line for 20 minutes while platinum medallion super club business class gets to board first (but not before those with small children!) (and heaven forbid your plane is there but hasn't been prepped yet so boarding time is delayed.)
        Southwest on the other hand bakes "encouragement to board" into the process. You pay for early bird boarding to get a better seat so you HAVE to be at the boarding gate and in the line on time to get the seat (but not before those with small children!). Even if you don't pay for the earlybird boarding you still have to be ready to line up for the other boarding groups or risk ending up in a middle seat. Boarding tends to just be faster that way but at the expense of you having to take a more active involvement.

        • I've heard late boarding is an issue for people who want to cram a bunch of shit in the overhead. I travel light or check my luggage, so it's completely crazy to me that you wouldn't wait until the last possible moment to board. I wait for the final group to clear before I get up.

    • Random boarding is the exact opposite of efficient.

      • Ever seen an intercity bus board at Port Authority terminal in NYC? Works just fine -- 40-50 people and one boarding door, they usually start boarding 4-5 minutes before the bus leaves. Even with something like a 100-person 737, this would still work fine, especially if they used air stairs on both the front and rear doors as some airports do (Burbank, CA is known for this). And yes, Ryanair usually boards on stairs because they're too cheap to pay for a proper gate.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Yep. Anytime I'm coming home into Burbank, I always go to the REAR of the plane, because many travelers are unfamiliar with this. Lots of overhead space, and pretty much my choice of seat.

          • Yep. Anytime I'm coming home into Burbank, I always go to the REAR of the plane, because many travelers are unfamiliar with this. Lots of overhead space, and pretty much my choice of seat.

            I don't like being near the toilets (which are typically at the rear). You get the smells and the constant people walking past your seat.

        • Even with something like a 100-person 737, this would still work fine

          Right, if you rent a plane and configure the whole thing as first class, everybody will be so happy with the legroom they won't complain much about the seating arrangement.

          • OK, 150-person. Still should be able to board from both ends in not much more time than it takes a 50-person bus to board (75 people per door vs 50).
    • While that sounds well and good, it could cause some problems with weight distribution. Here's one article [theguardian.com] that discusses an actual incident where this became an issue.

      Board the plane back-to front which is the most sane and keeps people from having to wait to move further back and creating traffic jams.
      • Ryanair uses air stairs. Board back-to-front. Deboard back-first from the rear door. That way, no one is excessively inconvenienced.

    • Southwest is more complex then that.
      First there is a $10 upgrade fee, where you get prescience over those who didn't buy it. So even if you check in last you still will get a A-Line or early B-Line spot in line. Then you have the fact that there is the ability to check in Online 24 hours before the flight. So right at the 24 hour mark before the flight you can rush online and check in (Normally in the early-mid B line), to give your self an early seat, If you have the upgrade price, then you could get re

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        First there is a $10 upgrade fee

        Until sometime in the past few months, it was $15 each way. I just found out today, when I booked Christmas travel, that it's gone up to $25.

        There's also another option. I nearly always pay for "early-bird check-in" (as they call it), but I somehow forgot to select that for a return flight a couple of years ago. I was a bit upset when I went to retrieve my boarding pass and found it was C30something. As it turns out, though, if priority boarding (something like A1 throug

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          I nearly always pay for "early-bird check-in" (as they call it), but I somehow forgot to select that for a return flight a couple of years ago. I was a bit upset when I went to retrieve my boarding pass and found it was C30something.

          Early-bird check-in is a scam. At this point, they oversell the early-bird check-in to the point that you can still end up late in the B section (after half the plane has boarded) even if you pay the extra "upgrade" fee. So at this point, it isn't about getting better boarding

  • "Crack Down"-Should be Forced Rebates & Penalt (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:12PM (#57701580) Homepage

    Seriously. This is just about the most abusive use of public information that I can imagine.

    "Cracking Down" doesn't even approach what needs to be done - the airlines identified should be forced to list all family groups who have travelled together since, I dunno, 1947 and pay back (with interest) all the exploited families.

    Anybody not complying should be subjected to something equal to or or worse than public hanging.

    Identification of airlines and, perhaps, public shaming just isn't appropriate here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's a relatively new thing with budget airlines, and Ryanair is named specifically.

  • Ryanair! (Score:3)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:15PM (#57701612) Journal

    This is Ryanair: the airline that charges to print boarding passes.

    Everything Ryanair does is intended to maximize revenue, since the base price of the tickets is so low.

    • Just head to deal with this. It's annoying but not a big deal, when I was buying tickets for my parents I just had to add a few bucks to choose 4 specific seats (for return flight). But I think they just do it for everyone, you get random seats unless you pay to select a specific one.

      It's a bit unpleasant of course but generally worth it to be able to get a 4 hour flight for like $30.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cfc-12 ( 1195347 )
      There's a song about that [youtube.com].

  • Moral (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:24PM (#57701660)
    Corporations don't have to be moral. Too bad for everyone.
  • So they did a statistical analysis and found that some airlines separated passengers more often than others but NOT 100% of the time (or anywhere close) on one airline.
    It sounds to me they've just done a statistical analysis on random number generator algorithms. I could easily see one programmer just doing a full on random seat pick while another does a best fit match algorithm then on to full on random seat generation if all tickets can't be allocated as a block.
    Possibly you're also uncovering situatio

  • If consumers have alternatives they can decide to go with a competitor if they don't like a particular policy, and the problem fixes itself. Setting policies which encourage or at least don't hinder competition is much more likely to be effective than setting policies to try to control things, as the supposed bad actors will always find ways around the latter.

  • I know it's an archaic idea, but it'd be refreshing to see non-partisan action from the government actually dealing with predatory business practices.

    Then again, the US gov't in 2018 can't seem to even stop robocalls (something everyone generally agrees is astonishingly annoying), so they're fucking useless.

  • I remember a flight in which the airline split us up, three different seats in three different rows. I didn't care that much: as soon as we entered the plane, the man sitting next to our almost-crying 4-yro girl offered to change the seat.

    I would never want to fly next to a lone child, nobody does. This problem solves by itself, at least with respect to children.

  • Ryanair? (Score:3)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @01:06PM (#57702014)

    If you don't want to be treated like shit, don't travel on a shit airline.

  • I bought airline tickets for my family on December 2016 for a flight on February 2017. They (Aeromexico) don't even assign the seats at purchase time and I can't risk being split up (who'd want to sit next to a lone toddler all flight; and I don't trust the airlines to do the right thing and reassign seats on the spot for free). So we ended up paying 30% extra over the entire flight's cost to have guaranteed seating together. So they may have started purposefully splitting in June 2017, but a practice of "h

  • Name and shame the airlines doing this so that I, and other people who prefer not to support psychopathic greedmonster ratfuckery, can avoid giving them my money by accident. Next, the airlines practicing this nonsense will naturally suffer increased incidence of air rage. Hopefully these forces can work together to pressure airlines to stop this nonsense.

  • The "problem" is probably that we now get to pick out seat when we book our flights. Nobody wants the middle seat in a 3-seat row. So the window and aisle seats get taken first. Then if a family books late, there are only middle seats left, forcing them to split up. The higher-fare seats usually sell last, requiring the family to pay for an upgrade if they want to sit together.

    In the old days, you didn't get assigned a seat until you were at the gate and checked in (in fact that was the purpose of th

  • Besides making them more money?

    I would imagine this creates a ton of extra work for the airlines when people who want to switch seats to stay together flood the departure gate attendants. Worse yet are the people who don't notice until they board, and then panic when they are split up.

    About 25% of my flights, I get asked if I would switch seats with someone so a family can be together. My policy is never to switch seats unless offered a superior seat, so there's a whole bunch of inefficiency for flight at

  • Ryanair... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by redbeardcanada ( 1052028 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @01:34PM (#57702202)
    Of course this would be Ryanair, the subway of air travel. I can't wait until they actually book standing room only and have people pushing in backwards so the doors can close.

  • There should be a way to fly without giving any personal information to the airline. Obviously the government wants to maintain their security theater, but that could be a separate process where you only deal with TSA or other intermediaries.

  • Or is it auto selecting seats based on balancing wight throughout the aircraft? Honest question.

  • We need an Airline Policy Standards Act (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Monday November 26, 2018 @02:36PM (#57702590)

    Fixing intentional family split-ups should be part of a bill that gets rid of a number of abusive airline policies that passengers can do nothing about:

    1. Fees shall be for features of a flight that are optional, such as meals or a second checked bag, rather than for items that you need on every flight. There shall be no extortionate fees for fixing a name typo or making a schedule change months ahead of time.

    2. There shall be a minimum seat width and pitch, as determined by flight safety professionals;

    3. All tickets which are non-refundable shall be transferable, with the cost limited to the above non-extortionate name change fee. A seat sold is a seat for which revenue has already been collected. Airlines will discover that no longer having to deal with special exceptions and notes from doctors is well worth the lost revenue from selling the same seat twice.

    4. The auction buyback system for oversells shall not be capped or limited in any way. If you really want a seat for that deadheading crew member at the last minute, you have to find a pax willing to give up his seat at the market price.

    5. For any ejection or denied-boarding of a passenger not coming under the oversell rule, the carrier must file a report with the FAA detailing the situation and attaching signed statements by all crew and passengers involved. No more ejecting a passenger because "somebody felt uneasy about this person."

    6. Passengers shall have unlimited right to film or record confrontations that occur during a flight, with the stipulation that a copy be submitted as evidence with any report the airline has to file in (5).

    7. Carriers shall be required to use real math, rather than 'airline math' in calculating rebates for downgrades from higher classes of service that a passenger paid for but which cannot be provided at flight time.

    The effect of such a set of minimum service standards will be to push revenue from extra fees, etc. into the base fare. Good, because this is the one number on which airlines compete. The reason for policies like charging people $5000 for fixing a name typo is to pull standard features of a flight out of the base fare, making it look artificially low. If a decently hu,mane level of service adds 20% or so to the base, then we will still be better off. Less air rage and fewer instances of "I'll never fly with you again!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LostOne ( 51301 )

      You forgot this one:

      0. Overbooking or overselling shall not be permitted and there must be automatic and non-optional compensation paid to the passenger that must be at least as much as the total amount paid for the ticket including all fees, surcharges, taxes ,etc. plus a meaningful punitive amount.

      The reasoning here is that if you have collected a fare for that seat, then you are not *by definition* losing money on that seat, even if it is empty due to a no-show. If you can't make ends meet without overbo

      • The existing oversell auction takes care of this case, but it can break down when airlines stop raising their bids enough to voluntarily free up a seat. That was what led to the Dao dragging. They just picked this guy out at random and dragged him off.

        My list is of course not exhaustive. The original family splitting problem is an example of something we could add.

        • Actually, dao was not truly random. He very likely bought the last single ticket for the flight.

          • Possibly a late cheap ticket.

            I used to use the best damn travel service. They would get me onto overbooked flights at the last minute and get some shmo booted. The trick is to buy an expensive international flight with the connection you need, then later cancel the international leg. Abracadabra, a seat becomes available on the full flight.

      • No, overbooking is needed because ppl will try to cheat the system. Back in the 60s, that was not done. But after Jimmy Carter Deregulated the airlines, regular coach passengers went down in class and worked on getting even cheaper rates and doing all sort of garbage to get seats. Back then, it was possible for the regular passengers to get stand-bys. That is gone, but the airlines still have a-holes pulling that prank so as to bring down the load so they car spread out. Oddly, that is due to the airlines o

      • It's true that a lot of overselling is caused by intentionally making the ticket rules, which are not negotiable and peculiarly not subject to competition, so restrictive that a lot of paid-for seats are simply abandoned. Transferability would cut down on this considerably, but oversales would still occur from time to time.

        When I started flying, in the Golden Age of the early Seventies, reservations were freely changeable until flight time. Airlines saw an industry-average 8% no-show rate and used that figu

    • I'm good with all your points except:

      1. Fees shall be for features of a flight that are optional, such as meals or a second checked bag, rather than for items that you need on every flight. There shall be no extortionate fees for fixing a name typo or making a schedule change months ahead of time.

      Who decides what is optional? IMO, a checked bag is optional.
      I went from the US to Europe for two weeks with a 18 liter backpack. In October, so warm weather wasn't guaranteed (at least not yet ;-).
      I don't want to subsidize you taking your 23 kg checked bag, your max sized carry-on, plus your "personal item" that you shove in the overhead along with your carry-on.
      Totally agree on the insane fees for name or schedule changes.

      • What I'm aiming at is to define what a standard ticket should include a minimum. A few people can get by without checking a bag, but most people check one piece. Charging for the first checked bag motivates pax to haul everything on board, which is a huge time-wasting mess. Airlines will publicly bitch but privately be overjoyed to not have every passenger vainly cramming a kitchen sink into the overheads. It will speed up boarding.

    • 1) is a mistake. Long ago, planes had smaller loads because the seat's pitch were decent. As such, carrying a 2nd bag was a big issue. NOW, more ppl on the aircrafts. As such, if you do not charge for the bags, ppl will bring all sorts of BS. 1 carry-on, and 1 checked (or 2 checked) is plenty fair.
      2) agreed. To be honest, it is in the airlines best interest to have a decent minimum pitch/width, but also a decent size bathroom. Those are insane and leading to ppl pissing all over the floor. That is getting

      • 5) skip #5. It is already done by the Pilot. It is filed with the airlines.

        Currently there is no passenger ejection reporting requirement. Most ejections are for valid cause, so filing a formal FAA report protects everyone in case of legal action. But at the same time it would subject the carrier to scrutiny if an ejection occurs because "A passenger took sick, so we put out a PA call for medical assistance, and this black woman stepped in who the flight attendant thought didn't look like a doctor" (Delta, just recently). If airlines knew that such actions could result in a wallop

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      7. Carriers shall be required to use real math, rather than 'airline math' in calculating rebates for downgrades from higher classes of service that a passenger paid for but which cannot be provided at flight time.

      If they screwed up by overbooking the higher class, then they should be on the hook - full refund (in cash, not coupons limited to buying more flights from them) plus a seat one class down on the same flight that was booked. Why should consumers settle for anything less?

  • Any airline that is doing this should be called out. It is one thing to charge much higher prices based on how soon you get a ticket, 1-way vs 2-way, etc. BUT, to actively split families and then make them pay to be together, are airlines and CEOs that I hope dies off soon.

  • They seem to go out of their way to make the entire experience as miserable as possible, and then they seem surprised that they keep losing money. I'm sure most folks would drop an extra 50-100$ if the seats were comfortable and the people working for the airline didn't always seem on the brink of suicide.

    I think the airlines, and now retail are an excellent example of what happens when you let the MBAs run all of your decision makings, they screw the customer at every chance to maximize profits until the c

    • I'm sure most folks would drop an extra 50-100$ if the seats were comfortable and the people working for the airline didn't always seem on the brink of suicide.

      In your dreams. In reality, people will see the increased cost on whatever booking site they use and move on the next airline.

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