Your Ticket: $60. Your Baby's: $1280
When company policy has a head-on collision with absurdity. Your United Airlines ticket is $60. Your baby's, who's going to be sitting in your lap? $1,280. [Elliot] (Photo: moxythecat)
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
Post a comment
Comments:
"who's".
Poon as a last name is funny.
But referring to the person throughout the article by her last name? HILARIOUS.
I'm totally OK with that. I consider homicide every time I'm on a plane or bus with a baby crying for 4+ hours.
The lady used frequent flier miles, but infants traveling in a passengers lap costs 10% of the standard cost of the seat, which in business class is a lot. It might not seem fair, but she's still getting a bargain compared to if she had to buy a full priced ticket (or use more miles) to buy a seat for the child, which as far as I'm concerned, should be required. --Allowing infants to travel in a parent's lap is dangerous, and it creates more problems for the passengers around them.
I have a hard time feeling sympathy for a person who is flying intercontinental business class for $60.
I think 10% of the airfare for a lap baby is reasonable, it should go to the people sitting adjacent.
Although I do agree with the author that the airline should allow her to cash in more FF miles for the baby's fare.
This may seem like a stupid question, but here goes: If they charge 10% for the lap child, is that saying that her tickets (had she paid without FF credit) would have been $13,000 apiece?
I have never flown business class or internationally, but that seems very expensive.
If it is that expensive, $1280 is not unreasonable, I guess.
Oh! It works now!
United really botched this one. They should've considered that it's likely that since she's cashing in her miles for tickets, she'll leave United's program.
The policy may be silly, I think it's more absurd to allow children in business or first class. It's a premium for a frigging reason. If I'm dropping $10K to fly international business to Shanghai, I'm paying for the premium to get sleep or prepare for my work upon arrival I'm not payin that premium to have some vacationing mom sit with her screaming kid beside me for 13 hours. That's what coach is for.
I got a "This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota" message when I tried to post a comment.
Children Haters Club, welcome.
Wondered how long before the child haters came out.
@jag164: I think you just described an upcoming article here: "Man pays $10K to be seated next to screaming baby" :P
Oh hell yes. I love this policy. The collective suffereing of the flight while your child screams is worth at least a grand. It's called "aligning economic incentives to promote desirable behavior."
What is the surprising aspect, or anti-consumer story here? The airline has set its price for an infant lap-child fare, and you accept or decline to pay it. Her ticket didn't cost $60. It cost $60 plus 100,000+ miles. Let that show in the story, why don't you?
Eliot's column is worthless -- it's all about people who think they shouldn't have to pay so much for this or that.
A real consumer-unfriendly story is when some business uses deceptive practices, lies, or treats someone against their own rules in an unreasonable way. This is not such a story.
I guess it would be less attention-grabbing to put the correct headline: "Mother upset at having to pay for her child to travel business class" or "Mom's ticket cost the equivalent of $12,800, she doesn't want to pay $1280 for her child"
But that probably will not generate as much ill-informed sympathy.
@missi1226: for business class.... its a little expensive, but not if she's flying far.... and that $1280 includes taxes, so its more like $1000....
@missi1226:
Looks like the account is over the limit now...guess I'll read the story later.
Missi - I don't know about $13K expensive. A round trip to the Philippines for me would have been about $6K if I had chosen to fly business class with my wife. Instead, I paid $1200 and flew cattle.
I feel bad for the people sitting near her who will have paid $12,000 and will have to sit next to a crying baby for a 10 hour flight.
@PandaWatch: I get "CPU quota exceeded".
Man, BlueHost must suck. And to think I was about to look into them as a hosting company :|
@alyssariffic: I love how you assume that every child is an incessantly screaming terror to be around.
Lighten up, you were probably a right brat yourself, and people tolerated you just fine.
@JGKojak: Wow, you're totally right. Because some people don't deal well with babies screaming for hours straight -- not to mention their incompetent parents -- on airplane flights, it means they hate children. Awesome! Thanks for your comment!
@missi1226: I just checked at united.com. The lowest return Business Class fare is about $12,000 and lowest return Economy is about $1,300.
If she had enough points to buy a third $60 ticket then there wouldn't be a problem.
Misleading title. She paid $60 plus who knows how much FFM's to for her ticket. Seems fair to me.
If it's reasonable to charge 10% for a baby-in-lap ticket, isn't it also reasonable that the fee be assessed in the same currency as the original ticket? In other words, the woman should have the opportunity to pay an additional 10,000 miles for the ticket, instead of $1280. Was she offered that choice?
Aside: I too have flown international to China, and I understand the "child-haters" who don't want the child in business in the first place; a child in a bad mood can ruin a flight, and that's a LONG flight! However, the woman did earn her miles legitimately, and if she wants to cash in for a business ticket, that's her right.
@acklenheights: My parents didn't take me on planes. They also reprimanded me when I was a brat. Most other parents fail on both counts.
Lap infants are NOT free on international flights-- that's the law. They are required to hold tickets. Ten percent of the full-fare plus taxes is pretty much industry standard. An average RT business class ticket to HKG is about 10K and average taxes are a couple hundred bucks, which makes it perfectly logical that the infant rate would be $1,200. The airline doesn't have to allow lap infants-- they offer that as a courtesy to their customers. Instead of complaining about having to pay $1,200 to transport the child, the OP should be happy that they're spending about $1,400 for about $36,000 worth of travel. And the OP could have bought tickets in coach and would have been paying around $300 for the lap infant. Or she could have used FF miles for all three of them. I don't really understand how the OP claims to be a frequent flier but doesn't understand that lap infants aren't free-- anyone who has traveled with an infant will confirm that they are NOT free.
Can I just say there were two babies and several small children on my flight yesterday and none of them screamed for 4 hours straight? I've only been on a flight where a child cried for more than a few minutes once, and his mother's solution to spank him wildly and at random, so I didn't really blame him.
The only other times I've seen babies cry in flight, it was usually for a short time and during times when it was likely that their ears were popping. I fly pretty regularly. How do I keep missing all these shrieking babies?
she should put the kid in a dog carrier. carry-on pets are only $175.
@JGKojak:
Wow, there's some heartfelt anger out there toward the ankle-biters. Can't say I've ever had a bad experience on a plane that was caused by infants or children. Perhaps I've just been lucky.
If this was a red eye fight the price of a baby's ticket is too low at $1280. For those of us who fly cross country at least once a month I think we'd like a child free airline or at least a 21+ daily cross country flight. Just like they do at movies.
@MrsLopsided: Thanks for the info. As a grad student, I could not imagine having that type of money at my disposal, lol. I was irritated that the last time I flew cost me $350 (roundtrip to Denver from Atlanta), now I realize just how poor I am. =P
Why does everyone assume that the baby will cry the entire flight? I hate that attitude. When my son was a baby, I recall getting all kinds of dirty looks walking toward my seat. At the end of the flight, those same people would coo at him and say, "your baby is so well behaved". I wanted to kick them in the shins.
The two adult tickets didn't cost $60 bucks a piece. The miles do have a value. In this case they are worth about $26000 dollars. If you think that 3 business class tickets to their destination would have cost $39000 dollars to get those same 3 tickets for under $1400 total doesn't seem at all reasonable. If they have that many miles, they have obviously flown a lot or spent a crap load of money on credit cards. The extra money shouldn't be that big of a deal for what they get in return. If they can't afford to fly with the added fare, how were they going to afford food, transportation etc. once they got to their destination.
@theirishscion: You've been lucky. Last time I flew intercontinental... straight shot from Dubai, no less... there were at last five babies and a couple toddlers in the cabin, and for most of the trip at least one of them was going off at any given time. Thank god for noise-canceling headphones. I wish there was such a thing as baby-noise-canceling full-head helmets... for the babies.
@Katxyz: Who knows? I wish you had been on my flight from Dubai this fall. At least five children and at any given time, one of them was crying, whining, or screaming.
@Underpants Gnome: But she earned the tickets through cashing in her points. It's not like she got the tickets for free, and she was demanding a free ticket for her child.
@speedwell: the last time I flew to Europe, I had more problems with people who kept getting up, moving past me with their gigantic coats. No babies, just people who couldn't sit down and stop bothering people as they walked by.
@blitzcat:
No doubt. The FFM are worth tens of thousands of dollars. This has nothing to do with policy. It has to do with PAYING for what you buy. The airline should just give her something worth $1280 because she has frequent flier miles?
Jeez Ben, you're better than that. Leave the pandering to this "Elliot."
@RogueSophist: I don't fly a lot, but I hardly think this should be portrayed as the way all children behave on planes. I did a cross-country trip this last summer and there were infants and toddlers in the coach cabin going both directions, and none of them "screamed for hours straight". An occasional child might be a problem... but an occasional adult is disruptive, too.
@Repique: Completely agreed. My perhaps over-the-top sarcasm was directed at JGKojak's inappropriate generalization that the commenters here who have had problems with babies on planes hate children. Which I sincerely doubt is the case.
@cordeliapotter: Dude, I couldn't agree more. Could they maybe add a small, soundproofed section to hold the little kids in? I was on a 3 hour flight once that took 8 hours and all the time on the plane, from the long wait on the tarmac, all though the air, right up until 2 minutes before the fasten seat belts light came on when we were landing, this kid screamed. At the 2 minute mark there, his dad took him. Kit shut up immediately.
I get an "error establishing database connection" when I go to the link.