It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse,
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
All I said about coordination is that it’s impractical!
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.