US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.

This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.

I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.

What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience.

What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human.

And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.