In 1934, Delta Air Lines carried its first passengers along a mail route between Ft. Worth, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina. Since then it has grown to become one of the largest airlines in the world by any number of metrics. In 2019, before the pandemic, it carried more than 200 million passengers.
Serving that many people, and getting them to their destination safely and on time is a complex operation with a lot of moving parts. One of the things that makes it so complicated is that people travel for a lot of different reasons.
Some people travel for work and care mostly about convenient schedules and the perks that come from traveling frequently. On the other hand, those work travelers have very different needs and desires than a family heading on vacation. For one, the person traveling for work is most often traveling alone. A family of five people headed to Florida for spring break is a group of five people. There’s a pretty good chance they’d like to sit together.
As someone who recently booked a trip to Alaska for a family of six this summer, I can attest that is often a bigger challenge than you might think. Just because you can select your seats online doesn’t mean there will be the right number of them together.
Now, however, Delta has a solution that is so simple, I can’t believe no airline has done this before. As reported by The Points Guy, Delta is now blocking off some rows on flights that can only be selected by groups of more than three travelers.
Delta says it’s using an algorithm to determine how many rows to block on a given flight. For example, family-heavy routes will see more reserved rows than one that is more popular with business travelers. As things change–even on a given flight–Delta can adjust the number of seats available for selection by groups.
In a statement, Delta confirmed the move and explained why it thinks blocking rows for groups and families is a good idea:
Being a customer-centric brand means we’re constantly…