Airline Creates An ‘XL Class’ For Overweight Passengers


Tiny Samoa Air was the first airline to charge passengers based on weight, and now, the company is creating a special “XL class” for larger passengers.

The controversial “pay what you weigh” airline is now creating a wider row on its aircrafts to comfortably seat passengers who weigh more than 130 kilograms (286 pounds). The new row gives larger passengers an extra 12 to 14 inches of space, alleviating the discomfort large people often face when sitting in small airline seats.

“Quite often the access is difficult, and even the space between the seats is enough that even when you’ve squeezed into the seats there’s no room for your legs. That’s where the XL has come in – we do it with shirts and clothing and other things where we have different standard sizes,” Chris Langton, the airline’s head, tells Business Insider.

Samoa Airline’s efforts to accommodate larger passengers make sense in Samoa, a country with one of the world’s highest rates of obesity. When flying on the airline, passengers pay a fixed price per kilogram for themselves and their luggage that varies anywhere from about $1 to $4 per kilogram, depending on the length of the route. Samoa Airlines seems to believe other carriers will follow suit and soon develop similar methods of calculating rates for passengers.

Derrie-Air, an airline that’s just a dream

A few days ago, Grant posted about Derrie-Air, a new airline that is to charge passengers by the pound–not just the baggage weight, but the passenger weight as well. “The more you weigh, the more you pay.”

As Grant noted in his post, and Daily Travel & Deal, the L.A. Times travel blog, reported yesterday, the airline isn’t real, but was created as an ad campaign study by Philadelphia Media Holdings to see how effective print advertising can be. There was enough of a buzz that it’s clear that people, in general, have problems traveling on the same plane with people who are overweight. Feeling squished in an airplane seat next to a person who is taking up more than his or her fair share of space is annoying at best and anger producing at its worst.

When I read about Derrie-Air, before I caught on to the hoax, I flashed to my high school friends who wrestled in the lower weight class. They barely ate for the season and told tales of how they worked on getting their weight down before they stepped on a scale before a meet to see if they qualified. If people did have to pay for their airline ticket according to their weight, I could see there might be some who would do the same thing wrestlers do about a week before their travel date. There they would be in their neighborhoods wearing sweatsuits, walking around the block over and over again, just to loose the water weight.

I also imagined the arguments couples would have at the airport, blaming each other for the extra weight one of them packed as their souvenir money was eaten up by the cost of the seat. “If it wasn’t for you we could have that extra day at Disneyland.”

Should overweight people pay extra? Canada says no.

Many airlines in the US state that passengers “needing an extra seat to maintain comfort” must pay for an adjacent seat. Their thought is that since they can’t sell that seat to another person, the passenger occupying part of that seat needs to foot the bill. And this mode of thought has prevailed through to the current age of air travel.

Some overweight members of the community disagree with that policy, however, suggesting that obesity is a disease and citing discrimination against the disabled. This makes carriers’ policy a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and technically illegal. So far, the US government has not interceded in this debate.

The Canadian government, on the other hand, has. Earlier this month the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) mandated that national carriers cannot charge an overweight passenger extra if he or she requires extra seats. The airlines now have a year to accommodate and integrate these changes into their systems.

What do you think? Should we do the same thing in the states?