Gulliver | Children in planes

Would you like to see adult-only flights?

Travellers in business class find the presence of children especially annoying

By A.B.

A PRESS RELEASE I saw today suggested that 74% of 1,000 business travellers polled consider children the most annoying thing about business-class travel. The idea that, having paid top dollar for better seating and food, their comfort should be compromised by fidgeting, chatting and even crying youngsters is enough to make some flyers blanche.

Is this a problem that needs a solution? If so, one answer is adults-only services; another is adults-only sections of regular services. Carriers operating Boeing 747s could, for instance, easily reserve the upper-floor business-class seats for adults, keeping the mewlers and the pukers downstairs with hoi polloi.

But while all travellers would agree with the appeal of a quiet flight, it's a big step to ban certain passengers from certain parts of a plane. I'd rather sit next to a well-behaved five-year-old than an adult with bad body odour, but I don't think smelly people should be herded to the back of the plane. Easier, I think, for airlines to continue to treat everyone equally, and do everything in their power to ensure that passengers throughout the plane are given all the help they need to rest.

UPDATE February 3rd: As pointed out by commenters and colleagues, The Economist has opined on this subject before. A leader from December 1998 suggested that some form of intervention was necessary to help passengers who find the company of children irksome:

For children, just like cigarettes or mobile phones, clearly impose a negative externality on people who are near them. Anybody who has suffered a 12-hour flight with a bawling baby in the row immediately ahead or a bored youngster viciously kicking their seat from behind, will grasp this as quickly as they would love to grasp the youngster's neck. Here is a clear case of market failure: parents do not bear the full costs (indeed young babies travel free), so they are too ready to take their noisy brats with them.

What to do?

The solution is obvious. All airlines, trains and restaurants should create child-free zones. Put all those children at the back of the plane and parents might make more effort to minimise their noise pollution. And instead of letting children pay less and babies go free, they should be charged (or taxed) more than adults, with the revenues used to subsidise seats immediately in front of the war-zone.

Passengers could then request a no-children seat, just as they now ask for a no-smoking one. As more women choose not to have children and the number of older people without young children increases, the demand for child-free travel will expand. Well, yes, it is a bit intolerant—but why shouldn't parents be treated as badly as smokers? And at least there is an obvious airline to pioneer the scheme: Virgin.

The leader-writer tells me she got more mail on this topic than on any other she has since written about. One particular letter, which appeared in The Economist two weeks later, bears repeating in full:

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