Pay-by-weight airfares

"Pay-by-weight airfares are an ethical minefield" says Dr Denis Tolkach. He explains that charging passengers based on their weight is highly controversial for many reasons, however it has not stopped some airlines experimenting with such policies.
Despite the lived experience of many and hot debate in the media, there has not been a formal study into what passengers themselves think about this matter. Their recently published research examined air passengers’ views on alternative airfare policies to understand whether the public finds them acceptable and what ethical considerations determine their views.

To get a better sense of how the public actually feels about this issue, they surveyed 1,012 US travellers of different weights, presenting them with three alternatives:
• standard policy – currently the most widely used policy with passengers paying a standard price, irrespective of their weight
• threshold policy – passengers are penalised if they are over a threshold weight
• unit of body weight policy – passengers pay a personalised price based on their own body weight, per each pound.

The standard policy was the most acceptable for participants of differing weight, although the heavier the passenger, the more they preferred the standard policy. This can be partially explained by status quo bias.

Generally, people are likely to choose a familiar answer. The threshold policy was the least acceptable. This policy was seen to violate established social norms and be generally less fair.

The unit of body weight policy was preferred to the threshold policy, although participants raised concerns about whether it would be accepted by society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that self-interest played a clear role in determining whether respondents considered a policy acceptable.

Younger, male, financially well-off travellers with lower personal weight generally found the alternative policies more acceptable. Interestingly, respondents that were more concerned about the environment – “ecocentric” – preferred air fare policies that would reduce the carbon emissions. This made them more open to the controversial alternatives.

While the threshold policy was clearly rejected by many respondents as discriminatory, environmental concern played a role in the level of acceptance of the unit of body weight policy. For policymakers overall, our study suggests when it comes to controversial ticketing policies, the public is more likely to be swayed by self-interest than anything else.

Read the full paper here or use https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jtr.2691