More and more airlines are trying to generate additional income by specifically targeting passengers traveling together. If you do not want to accept this, you will be asked to pay for seat reservations that are subject to a fee. The authorities in the United States of America are now taking action against this practice.

It used to be more or less a matter of course that people booked together, such as couples or families, could sit together on the plane. If you were too late at the check-in counter, things could go wrong, but only because there weren't any contiguous seats available and not because of the airline's financial interests. More and more carriers have now had sophisticated software programmed that "purely randomly" assigns seats in such a way that if they want to sit together, as many paid reservations as possible have to be purchased. Who says that the respective next seat has to be free? With a few lines of programming, it is possible to initially position the people booked together in such a way that if they don't like it, they can be asked to pay twice to change their seat.

In the US, this practice angers the authorities, because there are laws that say that families with children under 12 can sit together without paying an extra fee. However, not all providers took it very seriously and United Airlines, for example, got into trouble.

In the meantime, the Star Alliance member has said it has given in and has assured that from March 2023 it will be free of charge that children under the age of 12 can always sit next to an adult who is on the same booking confirmation. According to the company, the programming of the booking software was changed for this purpose.

At the time of booking, families with one child under the age of 12 are offered a choice of adjacent seats, even when flying in the lowest fare, which previously offered no seat choice. If, for whatever reason, there is no space left, families have the opportunity to transfer to another flight on the same route free of charge and if there is a difference in fare between the two flights, no fee will be charged. 

Family seat allocation fees are one of the items proposed in a planned Biden administration bill. The Junk Fee Prevention Act to Eliminate Unfair and Costly Junk Fees aims to save American consumers approximately $9 billion by eliminating certain pricing practices in areas such as credit cards, telecommunications contracts and airline tickets.