Brilliant way to upsell airline passengers: renumber the seats

I recently bought a ticket on Virgin Atlantic from BOS to LHR, July 6-15 (meet friends at the Glyndebourne opera and then maybe out to Oslo). The available coach seats are all way in the back of the plane, starting at row 40 and going up into the 60s. Who wants to wait for 40+ rows of people to deplane into the massive queues at Heathrow before getting off? Maybe it is time to pay up for Premium Economy or Business.

But wait… can they really cram that many seats into an Airbus A330? Even an Airbus A380 in high-capacity configuration (suitable for chartering to deliver a daily supply of 840 new migrants to cities and countries where the virtuous claim to want to welcome everyone!) can’t have 65 rows of seats, can it? The seatguru map shows that rows 12-15 don’t exist in Virgin’s A330. And rows 26-39 don’t exist. The “back of the bus” seat numbers actually start in the middle of the wing. The 50s are the new 30s!

Would you pay a 50 percent premium to move from row 22 to row 21? How about from row 40 to row 25? That has to be a better deal, right?

One thought on “Brilliant way to upsell airline passengers: renumber the seats

  1. Stupid behavior like this on the part of companies just invites litigiousness and/or more government regulation. Bad idea. Waiting for the lawsuits now.

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