One airline to test adult only zone on flights
One airline wants to know if people who want to be alone will pay a high price to avoid sitting next to newborns and small children.
Corendon Airlines said it will begin selling an adults-only zone — no one under the age of 16 — on flights between Amsterdam and Curacao in November.
According to the Turkish airline, people traveling without children would have tranquil surroundings, and parents will not have to worry about their crying or squirming youngsters bother fellow passengers.
Corendon stated last week that it will reserve 93 standard seats and nine extra-legroom seats in the adult zone in front of its Airbus A350 jets, which have a total of 432 seats. The part will be separated from the weeping masses further back by a wall or curtain.
According to the airline’s website, travellers will be charged an additional reservation cost of 45 euros ($49) for the no-kids zone, up to 100 euros ($109) for one of the extra-legroom seats.
To answer your next question, a flight from Amsterdam to Curacao takes approximately ten hours.
Brett Snyder, who owns a travel business and maintains the Cranky Flier blog, said on Tuesday that adult seats would be in high demand.
“For a heavy leisure airline like Corendon, which is probably full of families with little kids, I can see the appeal for someone traveling without kids to pay extra to be away from them to have more peace and quiet,” Snyder said.
People in the back of the adult zone, he noted, might still hear wailing, “so it’s like the old days when you were in the last row of the non-smoking section but could still taste that smoke.”
According to Scott Keyes, proprietor of the flight-search website Going, the Corendon surcharge is low enough to attract a large number of buyers, and the airline benefits in another way.
“New leisure airlines need strong marketing to break through,” he says. “For an otherwise unknown airline, trying something new and generating free press is valuable.”
Corendon is not the first airline to experiment with a section devoid of little children.
Scoot, a Singapore-based low-cost airline, sells a segment where customers must be at least 12 years old.
Malaysia Airlines declared in 2012 that children under the age of 12 will not be permitted in a 70-seat economy section on the upper deck of their Airbus A380 jets. Later, the airline backed down, saying that if there were too many families with children and newborns to fit in the lower deck, they could find space in the adult economy section upstairs.
