Any increase in price leads to some people deciding to skip the flight entirely. You might only need to raise prices by 30% percent or so to have a half-empty plane, if your customers are highly price-sensitive.

I would probably take fewer short holiday trips during the year - switch to 1-2 long holidays instead of 6-7 weekend trips. That way the cost of flying takes up a lower percentage of the overall holiday budget.

If people get used to higher prices, I also expect airlines to try and maintain them even after the seating restrictions are lifted, same as adding carry-on bag fees but not lowering the base price to compensate.

American tried this a few years ago with "more legroom throughout coach" back in 2005-ish and it nearly bankrupted them. People flatly and absolutely refuse to pay more than the bare minimum to fly places. This will not change once the pandemic panic dies down.

I'd pay a bit more for transcontinental flying but, like, I'm very much in the minority and I fly enough to get free upgrades most of the time anyways.

> People flatly and absolutely refuse to pay more than the bare minimum to fly places

This is too facile a take, given the existence of Business and Premium Economy.

I think the Asian low-cost carriers probably have it right with very very cheap basic seats, and then the ability to eke out the consumer surplus with reasonably priced “upgrades”. Air Asia’s “hot seats” have a tiny bit more leg room and are charged accordingly. I paid VietJet $6 for premium check-in, and it felt like the future.

Anyway, I suspect the very blunt approach of flight aggregators showing you cheapest first without clearly surfacing comfort factors cause what you describe, rather than an inherent unwillingness to pay among consumers.

Yes and no. It depends who's paying. For the most part leisure travelers aren't going to pay for anything other that basic economy. The basic economy experiment bears out that thesis: legacy airlines wanted passengers to pay more than LCC fares they had to compete with -- so they created an ostensibly painful and unattractive product in BE to encourage people to pay a tiny amount more for anything. Ultimately nobody did, and they felt they had to remove those restrictions -- and indeed most basic economy restrictions have been since lifted. The whole experiment ultimately cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.

Flight aggregators actually switched to providing more of this comfort information (especially Google Flights) specifically because of BE but it wasn't enough to save BE.

Business is paid for by businesses, and premium economy is paid for by, uh, cheap businesses. I think PE was brought in so in times of austerity businesses could avoid negative press associated with buying business-class airfare but still wanted to provide their employees a modicum of comfort so they could hit the ground running off the back of their flights.

LCCs are interesting, because I would argue they support my case: people won't pay more than the bare minimum fare for a flight. They may pay small amounts for comfort upgrades but the butt in seat is a commodity. Hence, legacy carriers who try and cover their costs of 50% less density in coach are going to get their lunch eaten by LCCs who don't as the pricing disparity grows larger.

> Business is paid for by businesses, and premium economy is paid for by, uh, cheap businesses.

I think this is probably wrong, but admit I don’t have the numbers to back it up. Last few years I’ve flown ~100 sectors in J and ~20 in PE, mostly intercontinental, and my impression is that there’s a strong showing of leisure travellers, based on the large number of couples and families. Could be expats with decent packages tho.

I'd love to know for sure too, I'll report back if I can find anything conclusive!

You don’t have anyway to contact you on your profile but I think we have stuff in common; feel free to drop me an email

Will do!

> LCCs are interesting, because I would argue they support my case

I think they bolster equally well the hypothesis that people will pay more, but they are guided to the cheapest option by Google Flights and so on, and then don’t price compare add-ons. Hard to know without hard data.

SouthWest would certainly agree with you, which is why they de-listed themselves from all the major OTAs a few years ago. That was before the UI updates for basic economy, though, so it's hard to say if that changed anything -- but of course they haven't been back.

    This will not change once
    the pandemic panic dies down

Once the pandemic dies down, they can put the seats back in.

I think it's self-selecting: the ones who fear flying won't fly no matter how many seats are aboard, and the ones who don't, don't care so much about the social distancing. Consider United's new aspirational social distancing program [1] where they don't do anything but block seat selection until check-in, so you can see who's next to you when you do, I think. It's such a non-policy it's kind of unclear.

[1] https://liveandletsfly.com/united-airlines-social-distancing...

If I wanted to pay ~double for a more comfortable flight, I'd be flying first class everywhere.

Only for domestic flights, I suppose? For me, double the price on an intercontinental flight (where leg space really matters) only gets me to premium economy. First class is closer to 3x-3.5x the price.

Not sure where you are flying. In Europe, there usually is no such option. Most of the time, all you can do is pay an additional €30 or so and get a seat with more legroom. And that's it.

That’s true if you’re flying on budget airlines like Ryanair or Easyjet, but nearly all the legacy carriers offer a business class “cabin” where the seats are usually the same as in economy but middle seats are kept free. That’s a 33% reduction in density, not 50%, but it’s not far off.

Those business class seats on "legacy carriers" are not available for double the price. Try some flight searches and compare direct one way flights between two cities in Europe. First of all, you will have a hard time finding a direct flight by Lufthansa for example. Secondly, a Lufthansa business flight will usually be over 5x the price of a Ryan air flight.

Oh yeah, I doubt you’ll find business class tickets that are anywhere near as cheap as twice the price of the average Ryanair flight, but as someone who is in the lucky situation to be able to avoid airlines that I find actively unpleasant, the price hop from economy to business needn’t be that large. It depends on the airline, route and dates of course, but I’ve seen (and bought) short-haul business class tickets that were less than 150% the price of economy.

Exactly, I am(or well, have been) flying very regularly and I've never been on a plane with a business class, much less first class. The best upgrade is an extra legroom seat.

> I wish they would simply remove every second seat and charge twice the price

Will that help with the virus? It is less than six feet and you will be with that person for hours or so.

Imagine 9 passengers sitting like this:

    ***
    ***
    ***

Now lets remove 4 of them:

    * *
     *
    * *
      

I would say every one has at least a 50% reduction in the number of people close to them. On top of that, minimum distance and average distance both went up. I wouldn't be surprised if the infection rate in the second example is only 10% of the first.

Pair that with everyone wearing a mask. I have read that the infection rate goes down by 95% between two people wearing a mask in comparison to two peole wearing no mask.

Pair that with a 10-minute test [1] which everyone has to take at the airport and let only negatively tested passangers on board.

I think instead of trying to wait it out and print money, we should start to engineer ourselfes out of this crisis.

[1] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-third-solution.h...

> Pair that with a 10-minute test [1] which everyone has to take at the airport and let only negatively tested passangers on board.

Isn't that the only thing you'd need? Then the seating arrangement wouldn't be relevant. Seems unnecessary to require both.

Depends on how quickly after an infection the test detects it. And on how reliable the test is.

Isn't the distance completely irrelevant in an airplane anyway, seeing as everyone is in a closed, pressurised environment with recirculated air?

That would hold true if the virus would behave like a gas that dissolves in air. But it is carried by droplets that fall to the ground.

I would think there is not more wind in an airplane then in a supermarket. So the droplets that carry the virus should fall down to the ground in a similar fashion.

It is not really recirculated air. Most use compressor fan bypass air with one-way check valves throughout the cabin.

You can already purchase two seats today to achieve this result if you wanted to.

I have never seen such an option.

Also, it would not give you the additional leg room that we would get if every second seat was removed:

    ***      * *
    *** -->   *
    ***      * *

And it would not save as much weight as removing the seats.