As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, airlines have been finding everyplace they can to add on extra charges to help compensate for the high price of fuel. If you’ve got a cheap economy-class ticket, you have to pay for extra bags, and for extra weight in your bags. You have to pay more for your drinks, and your sandwiches, and in some cases no more free peanuts and pretzels.

Passengers traveling “up front” in the premium classes aren’t being charged more for the extras (lord knows they’re paying enough for their tickets), but the fact that premium-class seats use up more weight is being reflected in carbon-offset charges.

So the question is, when will it get personal? A case could be made that a 110-pound woman uses less fuel than a 200-lb man, right? Last week, a series of ads ran in Philadelphia-area newspapers for a fictitious airline called Derrie-Air. It quoted price by the pound: $1.40 a pound (of your body weight) to Chicago, $2.25 a pound to Los Angeles. Talk about diet motivation!

The ads turned out to be a one-day campaign put together by Philadelphia Media Holdings with the help of an ad agency, to show potential advertisers how to generate brand awareness.

Sounds unthinkable, right? (And most women would probably fork over the maximum payment rather than subject themselves to being weighed in public anyway.) Well, not necessarily. Small planes do it. I remember being weighed (albeit along with my carry-on) for an inter-island flight in Hawaii. My traveling companion was a tall skinny photographer who weighed in considerably higher than I did; I was impressed to find out she was nonchalantly carrying around more than 50 lbs. of photography equipment (those were the days before digital).

Bloomberg carried the follow-up story about the truth behind Derrie-Air, and they quoted airline consultant airline consultant Robert Mann of R.W. Mann & Co. about the idea of being charged by weight: “If you look at the air-freight business, that’s the way they’ve always done it. We’re getting treated like air freight when we travel by airlines, anyway.”

Antidiscrimination laws will probably keep it from happening, but there’s a point at which the airlines can require someone very large to buy two seats. Why not set a flat rate per passenger including luggage? A skinny person gets to have more free luggage? Derriere (excuse me, ‘Derrie-Air’) might have something there.

- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under Mary's Blog, Airlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.