Is It Still Okay to Recline Your Seat?

I asked her that, as we disembarked in Abbotsford. She said she wouldn't have. Based on her question and then her answer to my question, I know she didn't represent the typical attitude of the average passenger.

Do it anyway! I just went to Africa and back --do you know how many flights that is? It works to let the person behind know what to expect. Hey, we're all in this together.

Don't ask, just tell that you will recline now. Still polite but you can't be turned down.

BS. People reclined without asking long before. It's become a problem since seat space has shrunk. Blame the airlines and just get a bigger seat.

Most travelers don't pay for their own tickets. Their clients/employers pay for them. Wake up.

Due to the ever-shrinking seat pitch, the vast majority of us are going to use the latter, unless we're traveling across water.

The "20%" business above is a strawman argument. If you cut the 34" seat pitch by 20%, you'd be knocking 6.8" off of it, taking it down to 27.2". No one will, willingly, pay for so little space because most people can't fit into it. Going from 34" to 31" is not quite 10%.

The last flight I took was over 2 hours on Allegiant, back in 2019. The seat did not recline. It was a piece of molded plastic with a couple slightly-softer plastic pieces attached; no real cushions to speak of. I'm not excessively tall (5' 10") and my knees were hard against the seat in front of me. My beloved is similar height. We were having difficulty walking, for most of a day, after each end of that round-trip flight.

It was a sufficiently-bad experience that we've not flown since.

If we want to travel, we rent a minivan (sufficiently heavy, with a long-enough wheelbase, that we don't get beaten to death by the lousy roads) and we drive. It takes longer but my beloved and I can trade off on driving duties and both of us can walk afterwards. If there's an accident, the rental company provides another vehicle and we keep going. If it was our vehicle, we'd have to stop and wait until it was fixed, likely eating up our vacation time, and we might lose a vehicle on which we depend to get to work. Renting means we pay more, relative to driving our own vehicle, but someone else eats the risk. Since we'd need a rental car after flying to our destination, the price difference (renting and driving vs flying and renting) is small.

Go ahead airlines, keep squeezing the seats. Keep cancelling flights when you can't fill the planes. People are price sensitive, yes, but spending a day getting to the point that you can walk again also has a price. All it takes is one such experience, as above, and you've permanently lost another customer.

So you're saying that if I work "hard" my company will change their travel policy? You are an "ID-ten-T" error.

I'm also 6'4" and in general, when I fly economy, my knees do touch the seat in front of me, and reclining doesn't help. I have asked people not to recline, and in general, they've been nice about it. These are usually within the U.S. and of less than four hour flights.

You sound like a bully to me, tall guy with attitude. Just saying.

No, passengers have the right to assume that buying a ticket will give them a seat of at least adequate comfort-that is, it should not actively cause them pain. I'm a medium-sized guy at 5'9". I can't imagine being taller than this on some of these flights. On flights to/from Brazil (9 hours) last year on a 787-8, my economy class seat was supposedly 31" pitch. But it felt way tighter than that. The seat "recline" actually advances the seat forward and angles your feet under the seat in front of you. A brilliant idea, if you don't have carry-on items stored there.
Seating that can accommodate an individual of 6'2" tall without their knees touching the seat in front of them would make sure than 99% of customers have enough leg room. My guess is that this would also eliminate the whole reclining discussion because the seats would not recline right into anyone's face. And we know the airlines can monetize this because they offer coach class seats with additional room provided for a fee -- IF you can snag one.
In any case, because there is no real way for a customer to know what is being purchased at the time of sale for an airline ticket and because said ticket is unrefundable when passengers board, the airline should absolutely be required to provide seats ensuring no physical distress for virtually all customers at the time of booking. The only way to do this is to require minimum pitch on all airlines.

But that doesn’t make it”ok”!

I'd love you to take a Ryanair flight. See how much you recline there.

A passenger on an international flight got out of his seat to complain to the flight attendant that the person in the middle was using "his" arm rest. Flight attendant said: Person in aisle seat gets aisle arm rest, person in window seat get window arm rest, and person in middle gets both arm rests. I'd never heard of this before - but apparently others have!

“Gets”? Where is that written? Same as reclining. I agree with your statement, but it’s more like “is entitled to”. If there’s a wide body sitting next to you, you’ll be hard pressed to use the arm rest. A few times I experienced that, I not only couldn’t use that arm test, but the dude fell asleep with his arm on it AND my tv controls. The weight of his arm kept inadvertently changing my channels!🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️😩👎

LOL! Ya, right. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

...said the super jumbo blob who should pay for three seats.

Sorry snowflake - no permission or notice required - and if you start drumming on my seat back on purpose we'll probably end up talking to an air marshall.