Samoa Air will begin to charge passengers by the kilo. Picture: Samoa Air / Facebook
SAMOA Airlines has started to charge passengers by the kilo, rather than per seat.
No, this is not an overdue April Fool's Day joke. It is real.
Samoa Air started operating in the Pacific last year. Chief Executive Chris Langton said paying per kilo is the fairest way.
What do you think? Is pay per kilo the fairest way to fly? Tell us below.
"People have always travelled on the basis of their seat but as many airline operators know airlines don't run on seats they run on weight and particularly the smaller the aircraft you are in the less variance you can accept in terms of the difference in weight between passengers," Mr Langton told ABC radio.
"There is no doubt in my mind that this is the concept of the future. We always weigh the mass that is on an aircraft. And that always has to pay for the transportation, it doesn't matter whether you are carrying freight or people. Anyone who travels at times has felt they have been paying for half of the passenger next to them. The standard width and pitch of the seat are changing as people are getting a bit bigger wider and taller than they were 40-50 years ago."
Under the pay by weight system passengers input their weight into the online booking section of the Samoa Air website and pay the "pay-per-kilo" rate for that sector.
The rates range from $1 a kilogram – for the weight of the traveller and their baggage – on the airline's shortest domestic route to about $4.16 per kilogram for travel from Samoa to American Samoa.
Mr Langton told the ABC he believed many passengers would be pleasantly surprised by the cost of pay by weight.
"We have worked out a figure per kilo. This is the fairest way of you travelling with your family or yourself. You can put your baggage on, there is no separate fees because of excess baggage - it's just a kilo is a kilo is a kilo.
"The people that have been most pleasantly surprised are families because we don't charge on the seat requirement, even though a child is required to have a seat - we just weigh them. So a family of maybe two adults and a couple of mid-sized kids and younger children can travel at considerable less than what they were being charged before."
Last week Norwegain academic Dr Bharat P Bhatta called for 'pay as you weigh' flights so airlines can recoup the cost of the extra fuel required to carry larger people.
"I think the simplest way to implement this would be for passengers to declare their weight when buying a plane ticket," Dr Bhatta Sogn og Fjordane University College told London’s Daily Telegraph. "This would save time and eliminate expense.
"At the airport airlines could randomly select passengers and if they lied about their weight they would have to pay the fat fare and a penalty."
Dr Bhatta said charging according to weight and space was a universally accepted principle, not only in transportation, but also in other services
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