Honestly? I'm in favor of this. When I travel, I make a serious effort to pack lightly. In fact, during our recent two week honeymoon to Italy and Greece, my wife and I did the entire trip each toting along a small backpack and a rolling carry-on bag. Two weeks in Europe with carry-on only. Except, of course, the little plane that took us from Venice to Rome. They made us check our little rolling bags. And then lost them.
But I digress.
Basically, I see this as a first step to the unbundling of airline pricing. An additional step would be to follow Spirit Airlines, who charges additional for seat reservation. $10 for a window or an aisle, $5 for a middle seat. Seriously, I'm going to sit in the middle and PAY $5 for it? And they charge $15 for exit row seating. I have an issue with charging extra for emergency exit row seating (is it an emergency row or is premium seating?), but that's not worth getting into.
I do want to talk about price bundling.
As a general rule, I am in favor of price unbundling. The way I see it, with the price of oil continuing it's upward ascent, the airlines do not have a lot of options here. They can either raise their prices for everyone across the board, or they can recognize areas where they will charge a small premium, and allow that to be at the discretion of the passenger.
Think about dining at a restaurant. What if prices were all bundled? I guess some swanky places do this, and make it sound like a privilage by calling it "prix-fixed" dining. But I tell you what, I would much prefer to order what I want and pay for what I order.
Another industry in which I would love to see some price un-bundling is cable television. I mean come on! You get a basic package with Food TV, ESPN, Bravo, MTV, TNT, Cartoon Network, etc. But how many of those do you watch? What if they charged you $2 per channel (or some other amount)? I would get the major network channels, ESPN and Food TV. That's pretty much it. Yes, I occasionally watch the Discovery Channel and HGTV, but if I could unbundle the whole thing and just get the channels that I want, I would definitely down the number of channels that we get.
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