Pobeda Airlines, which bills itself as a "low-cost" airline, attempted to justify banning its passengers from changing seats in the aircraft cabin by citing a desire to facilitate the identification of their bodies after a plane crash. The carrier published this strange statement on its social media pages on the morning of June 4, reports Travel.ru's own correspondent.
Even by the standards of the so-called "managed scandals" allegedly practiced by Pobeda's PR team, this statement seems over the top. Pobeda's message was not well received by its passengers: the post quickly attracted a slew of outraged comments from readers.
Pobeda cited the identification of passengers killed in crashes as the second reason allegedly prompting it to prohibit transfers from assigned seats. The first was safety requirements, but only those that apply to a very limited group of its customers: passengers with infants (their seats are required to have two oxygen masks) and those who may be seated near emergency exits. The carrier was unable to come up with any justification for its ban from the safety of other passengers.
In reality, Pobeda's ban radically compromises the safety of its flights. It's worth noting that the company combines this practice with mandatory forced seating of passengers flying together in separate sections of the cabin, away from each other (unless they pay extra to sit together). In the event of an emergency requiring an urgent evacuation, this policy is guaranteed to disrupt the evacuation: relatives seated in different rows will search for each other in the cabin and block the evacuation aisle for other passengers. Couples, friends, and so on will do the same.
Pobeda makes the only exception for children under 12: one accompanying adult must be seated next to them. But only one. If a family is flying, only the mother or father may sit next to a child under 12, while the other spouse (possibly along with other children) will be seated in a different section of the cabin. Clearly, this doesn't improve flight safety, but rather worsens it. Children over 12 will always be seated separately from both parents—unless, of course, they pay Pobeda to sit together.
Fortunately, we haven't yet had the opportunity to test the consequences of Pobeda's disregard for these obvious safety considerations—its aircraft have never encountered situations requiring emergency evacuation of passengers. Until that happens, Russian aviation authorities should prohibit Pobeda, as well as any other carriers, from intentionally seating passengers flying together in different parts of the cabin, or from prohibiting reassignment.
Pobeda was only the third to list the only true reason for its absurd ban—the desire to extract as much money as possible from passengers for seat selection. "If no one buys paid extra services, then they'll have to be included in the basic fare, which will be roughly the same as traditional airlines, and then we can forget about cheap tickets. So what's the point of a low-cost carrier then?" the airline wrote in its post.
This is all blatant nonsense: dozens of low-cost airlines have been operating successfully around the world for years, and none of them impose restrictions on seat reassignment, and virtually none force passengers flying together who haven't purchased seat selection to be seated together. This doesn't stop all these airlines from offering low-cost tickets—and they're often significantly cheaper than those sold by Pobeda.
Incidentally, Pobeda consistently demonstrates very high profits, largely due to a deliberate policy of creating as many inconveniences as possible for its passengers, with the goal of incentivizing them to pay extra to avoid them. Not the least of these inconveniences (and the resulting additional revenue) is the ban on reassigning seats on board the plane. Unfortunately, this method of generating revenue is not only morally questionable but also directly undermines Pobeda's flight safety. It's high time regulators took notice of this practice and banned it entirely.
Source: travel.ru