[decimalenough]

> Customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more.

If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.

But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.

[Jweb_Guru]

Or maybe consumers do not want to (because it doesn't make economic sense for them, or because they don't want to spend every second of their free time optimizing) spend a significant amount of their time doing this kind of research before every purchase decision? I have never understood this argument that as long as information is technically available companies should be absolved of meeting some minimum level of baseline quality. You're also describing an industry that's unusually transparent (in part because there are not that many models of planes); for a lot of online goods there is absolutely no reasonable way you can know what a particular brand will be like before you buy.

[ChadNauseam]

If they don't want to look at the relevant column in Google Flights they don't have to. But money and time are the units of caring. If someone isn't willing to take 60 seconds to research or spend $5, I just don't believe it matters that much to them.

Flights in my mind are already a very high quality product offered at a very reasonable price. I can pay $250 and get across the country faster and more safely than any other means of transportation. I don't necessarily think that extra legroom is part of a "baseline level of quality" we should expect everyone to know you feel is worth the money and automatically provide to you

[theobreuerweil]

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

[Retric]

Not everyone needs extra space and for those who do the hourly rate for being in mild discomfort on an airline is huge.

It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.