Kevin Smith’s story has been in the headlines… I’ve been thinking about my own experiences, and thankfully have never had that negative an experience.

But I’ve given it some thought, and I think I have a solution…

Air Canada
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Once, I was flying Air Canada (though not to single them out – their policies on this are pretty standard across airlines), and I weigh 180lbs (82kg) – but my luggage was over sized, and there were several extra pieces, to the tune of $600.00 .  While checking the luggage, the counter staff apologized for the overage – but charged me nonetheless.  Of course I wasn’t thrilled to part with my hard-earned money, but I was paying for a service:  Get me (of totally discretionary weight) and my heavy bags ($600.00 worth) to my destination.

So I paid for the overage.

Two things come to mind:

  • Airlines: Widen your seats.
    • I spent some time on boeing.com today to see if I could find a seat size specification, and I couldn’t within 10 minutes of looking – if someone reading this knows how to find them, please leave a comment.
    • Seriously: the society we live in today (here are some Canadian statistics from a report prepared for Parliament in 2005) has lots of overweight and obese people.  Approximately 58.8% of Canadians are overweight, and 23.4% of Canadians are obese.
    • Yet the airline seats continue to be made for a 100lb person who is 5′5″ tall.
    • Come on, larger plane seats would make everyone, save the greedy shareholders, a lot happier.
  • Customers: Pay for the weight you bring onto the plane.
    • My belief is that a plane ticket should be for travel of x lbs from Point-A to Point-B.
    • Let’s say that x=300, so in my case, I would take up 200lbs in the cabin (myself, my laptop, my very aromatic food) and another 100lbs of luggage, after which, I would start to pay overages.
    • So if i weighted 270lbs, I would be seated in one of the new larger seats (see above) which should, statistically take up 50% of the plane, and only have 30lbs of luggage weight left available, and if I weighted 110lbs, the difference to 300 could be made up in luggage.
    • This could even be spun as a money-point:  unclaimed weight below 300lbs could be offered as a credit with the airline.

Until the airlines (and consumers) start living in reality: we will see more of these stories (forced to buy two tickets, discretionary decisions made at the gate, etc.), and stories like this aren’t good for anyone.  They hurt the feelings of overweight passengers, they make the airlines look mean, and they make everyone [even more] hesitant to fly.

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