One airline plans to find out if solitude-seeking travelers will pay a hefty extra charge to avoid sitting near babies and little kids.
Corendon Airlines says that it will sell an adults-only zone — no one under 16 — on flights between Amsterdam and Curacao starting in November.
The Turkish carrier says people traveling without children will get quiet surroundings, and parents won’t have to worry that their crying or fidgeting kids will annoy fellow passengers.
Corendon announced last week that it will set aside 93 regular seats and nine extra-legroom seats in the adult zone in the front of its Airbus A350 jets, which have 432 seats in all. A wall or curtain will separate the section from the wailing masses farther back.
The airline said on its website that it will charge passengers an extra reservation fee of 45 euros ($49) for the no-kids zone, rising to 100 euros ($109) for one of the extra-legroom seats.
To answer your next question, a flight from Amsterdam to Curacao usually takes about 10 hours.
Brett Snyder, who runs a travel agency and writes the Cranky Flier blog, said Tuesday that there could be demand for adult seats.
“For a heavy leisure airline like Corendon, which is probably full of families with little kids, I can see the appeal for someone traveling without kids to pay extra to be away from them to have more peace and quiet,” Snyder said.
Then again, he added, people in the back of the adult zone might still hear crying, “so it’s like the old days when you were in the last row of the non-smoking section but could still taste that smoke.”
Scott Keyes, founder of the flight-search site Going, said the Corendon extra fee is low enough to attract plenty of buyers, and the airline benefits in another way.
“New leisure airlines need strong marketing to break through,” he said. “Trying something new and generating free press is valuable for an otherwise little-known airline.”
Corendon is not the first airline to try a section with no small children.
Scoot, a low-cost airline based in Singapore, sells a section where passengers must be at least 12.
Back in 2012, Malaysia Airlines announced it would not allow anyone under 12 in a 70-seat economy section on the upper deck of its Airbus A380 jets. The airline later retreated, saying that if there were too many families with children and infants to fit in the lower deck, it would find room for them in the adult economy section upstairs.
(AP)
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7 Responses
I’ve long had an idea of having a men section a female section and a family section in the middle
As with this, I still don’t know how the logistics would work out
Will tickets for the rear section be labelled “Beyond the wailing wall” ?
Coffee Addict: So separate sections for different age groups, different genders etc.
So whats next? Separate seating for Litvish and Chassidish? Will each Chassidus and each letter of the LGBTQI+ get at least one dedicated row of seating?? Not sure where you draw the line
@Refoel Moishe, that’s hilarious!
In the mid 1980’s a charter airline named Tower Air was created. It was supposedly run by Frum owners, and provided Kosher flights from Israel to and from the US and some European countries. Using 747’s, they utilized the 3-4-3 seating arrangement to have male passengers on one side of the plane, female passengers on the other side, and families in the center. Depending on the time of year and the demand, there was either a section of the plane set up like that or the entire flight. Some sections did not show in-flight movies (in those days the movie was projected on a large screen, so you couldn’t ignore it). All the food was Mehadrin Kosher.
Tower grew to the point where it was able to purchase several planes for a steady TLV-JFK run without resorting to chartering.
However, 3 things came together to finally sink them.
1: El-Al decided to crush them and lowered their ticket prices to a point where they were actually below cost. They could afford to do that because they had other lucrative routes to other countries. Tower couldn’t keep this level of pricing.
2: While the Frum clientele might have been ready to accept higher prices for being able to fly on a Mehadrin flight that met their needs, Tower shot themselves in both feet, then proceeded to shoot themselves in the head. Flight delays were the norm – you KNEW your flight was going to leave anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours late. Ticketing and seating mistakes were commonplace, and they messed things up with the separate seating.
My father and I took a Tower flight from JFK to Israel back in 1998. At the stated takeoff time, at least a quarter of the passengers had not gone through the check-in process. While waiting in line, a person approached us and told us to be aware that the separate seating was not being adhered to.
Reaching the gate, we realized that my father was given a boarding pass under the wrong name – same last name, but a woman’s first name. Security at the plane almost didn’t let him in, but once they saw both names on the passenger manifest they decided to let us on since they were already used to such mistakes.
Both my father and myself were assigned middle seats, one behind the other, on the left side of the plane, which was designated for men. Shortly after we sat down, the woman whose name was printed on my father’s boarding pass arrived at his row, demanding his seat – as that same exact seat was assigned to her. They had given her a duplicate boarding pass, not realizing that it was issued already. Yet this middle-aged frum woman was assigned a middle seat on the side reserved for men. Fortunately, the flight crew was able to get her to a proper seat for her. During the flight I noticed several women seating in the men’s only side.
3. Tower had horrible maintenance issues. The planes were not properly taken care of and many suffered from severe malfunctions, which was part of the reason the flights were so often delayed. The planes were not clean, looked dilapidated, had problems with passenger-operated controls (like lights and air vents) and lavatories.
No one was willing to pay higher prices when they were getting bad service and NOT getting the Mehadrin features that were promised to them. And so Tower collapsed and went bankrupt in May 2000. The officers and directors were sued by the bankruptcy trustee for “driving the company into insolvency by indifference and egregious decision-making.”
Moral of the story:
You CAN do certain things, like separate adult seating, or Mehadrin male/female/family seating – if you know what you’re doing and make sure you’re operating at high efficiency. But if you try to run it like a “heimishe business” – you’ll fail.
This won’t help you avoid the loud and whining adult complainers.
bring ear plugs, that what I do and then I can sleeeeeep….