Can you give an example? I just checked a random rental website for France and I got a very clear `From $xx` price and I could — in one step — go to checkout with that exact price by simply not selecting any other options.

Sure you will have upsells but if a price for a service is presented, that should be a final price. You can't tack on "resort fees", the price presented must be inclusive of all the required charges. For example as much as I dislike Booking.com, the price they show for a room includes everything — tax, mandatory cleaning fee and city tax if applicable.

One example: Chicago to New York on United, direct flight that is ~2.5 hours. $209 for economy and $381 for Economy Plus. This is a $172 difference.

I'm most familiar with United. Economy Plus (which is mostly about a bit more legroom) does have a modest premium absent sufficient status that gets you it for free. But Premium Economy that gives you somewhat wider seats as well as legroom gets into the hundreds of dollars. International business has lots of benefits including legroom and lie flat seating but that usually gets into the thousands.

In a search just now, Delta Main r/t from ATL-LAX is $337. Delta Comfort on the same flight is $727. (Yes, it's more than 2x the price.) Obviously Comfort boards earlier, but it's not unreasonable to attribute most of the fare differential to the legroom.

Checked bags are also extra for either seat.

I'm 6'6" and I basically treat an exit row upgrade as non-negotiable. It's just a fundamental cost of long haul travel for me if I can't swing premium economy or business class.

To get some extra legroom, I paid (round trip, in CAD) $250 for a trip to Dublin this year and $320 for a trip to Hong Kong in 2023. That's a lot of money, but it was <50% of the cost to upgrade to premium economy and <20% of the cost to upgrade to business class.

This used to be much cheaper. I remember paying ~$100 for similar upgrades a decade ago, but airlines got wise to this at some point and jacked the prices way up.

US flights (99% of what I have experienced) definitely can get into three figures for anything other than "middle seat, way back". They know there's at least a built-in audience of taller people who will spring for legroom on any flight over an hour. And now that I am old and tall, an aisle seat and legroom are incredibly valuable to me (don't tell 'em, ok?).

Yes, as a 6' 2" person, I can assure you that a single leg of a flight will be less that $100 but round trip and multiple legs moves it to $200+ very easily.

The point of the comment is it’s hard to be sure because the pricing is anything but clear.

It’s really easy: it’s all about revenue maximization.

Honestly, people fly too much. I’m 6’5 with a 24” shoulder - flying economy is painful for me and the poor soul stuck next to me.

I don’t need to fly for business and am fortunate to have a lot of PTO. So, I fly first class, business class, or not at all. If the cost is too much, i drive. There’s virtually no east coast trip that is more unpleasant to me via car. I’m young enough that I can do NY to Georgia or Chicago overnight with no ill effect. There’s so much wasted time around the airport many flights don’t even save time.

I’m going on a trip to Asia in the early spring with my kid. I could save like $4000 flying in the back… but why? If that amount of money is breaking the bank, I cannot afford two weeks there anyway.

First principle is that customers will choose whoever has the cheapest flights in general, and airlines that try to market on having an inclusive price without surprise fees suffer anyway because the real cost is closer to fees.

The second is price discrimination - think current McDonald's prices. Soaking people who can afford it and letting people who are very frugal navigate your confusing system and membership etc is worth a good amount of money

To add to this - is there some kind of general rule for what specific industries will devolve into the pattern of having these sorts of anti-consumer practices? Off the top of my mind I can think of cable companies, gyms, cellphone providers, airlines, live events. Is it market capture and/or the high cost of switching providers that prevents meaningful competition?

The Behind the Bastards podcast episodes covering Frank Lorenzo might be right down your alley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bmGff5f-Ug

(They are available from all the usual podcast places, but it just happens that the youtube mirror is the easiest way I know to link a specific episode.)

I think the main motivation is simply that reduced transparency enables better price discrimination: As a company, you want every individual to pay as much as they are willing/capable. You explicitly don't want to sell the same service for the same price to everyone.

>board room high fives all around"

Things like bonuses tend to be driven by short term gains. Who gives a hell about a few years from now when you can get an extra $xxxxxxx in your paycheck now.

I don't follow the point. Suppose we live in a perfect world where exactly similar alternative flights are always available the moment yours gets cancelled. You still have to pay for it. And you do that by using the refund money.

Cancelling a flight without refunding it, just means profiting at the expense of the customer.

Businesses are able to insure their limited cost of cancellations, and price their tickets to absord these insurance costs (which are ultimately born by the ticket-payer).

Deregulating this point just puts all the risk and burden with millions of individual customers, some of whom cannot easily carry the cost of unexpected events, and aren't professional parties that can and routinely do enter into properly-negotiated insurance products to mitigate their risk.

> 've done this myself in the past, as far as I remember; changes of a few minutes in either direction often make an entire booking refundable.)

My understanding is that refunds eligibility starts at a >3 hour change, meaning an alternative timetable of 2 hours doesn't trigger an automatic refund right now. Further, even in the case of a significant change (>3h), the refund isn't automatic, it is only paid once the customer refuses an alternative booking or compensation. For international flights it's even 6 hours instead of 3.

> Arriving a few hours later can be entirely fine or completely ruin a trip, depending on the circumstances.

I do agree on this point, context really matters. And I think in theory it makes sense to offer price-differentation based on the context. i.e. if I am slow-travelling for 4 months, I'd be happy taking a 10% cheaper ticket (no-insurance), and have no recourse if there is an 8 hour delay.

Whereas earlier this month when travelling overseas for a wedding the day prior, I'd have paid a 10% extra fee to insure my travel time, to ensure I have recourse to travel with a limited (<2h) delay no matter what or be significantly compensated.

But that's still all theory, at some point differentiation on everything leads to complex and difficult decision making for customers. Fun in a Sim computer game, not so fun when booking a flight is a 20-step process with 200 pages of T&C that I have to assess against my personal situation.

Okay, I can see some benefits to the airline that are not too egregious for point 1, maybe automatic can be updated to manual intervention. Not the worst.

But price transparency ?

> A4A opposes the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) rules requiring airlines to disclose ancillary fees upfront, arguing that these rules exceed the DOT’s authority and don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers.

> don’t provide any clear benefits to consumers

As a customer I like to know where my money is going and how much.

Airlines caused automatic refunds by systematically screwing customers for a decade, doing every single thing in their power to avoid giving any refunds. This policy exists because they proved to everyone they can't be trusted.

> First, realize that there is no such thing as the 'public interest'. The public is composed of different subdivisions of people, from everyone everywhere down to the individual.

I don't buy that at all, that's what regulations are for. There is no public interest in still having lead in our fuel [0], or arsenic in green wall paint [1]. To say regulations are not for public interest is to say why have any oversight of anything.

Should we say "well fuel companies can make fuel cheaper with lead so lets just remove those regulations.

[0] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/inside-20-year-c...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green#:~:text=Because%20...

Airline travel is safer than it has ever been in its entire history. What is your evidence for this hypothesis?

Yes, But no one wants to have to go to court or arbitration to get a refund on a service that the service provider cancelled.

If AA cancels my flight, I want my money back without having to ask for it. I don't want to have to submit an application to receive AA credits that expire in 6 months, and then have to initiate legal action to get my actual cash back. Or having them say that they rebooked me on a flight three days later so they are off the hook.

The current rules make it so that the customer has the power. I can still give AA the option of rebooking me or refunding me, but it is MY choice.

a credit instead of a refund is almost the same thing as not offering a refund. you're going to have a hard time using that refund in a manner that benefits you (not taking a flight for no reason)

If you know it's a low value post then don't post it.

Every one of their pilots learned to fly in a GA or military aircraft, with the vast majority being GA.

80% would be way too much, the consumers would catch on and probably not buy tickets anymore. But don't worry, the airlines' best MBAs will be hard at work calculating the exact percentage of flights they have to fly before it starts hurting the bottom line. And once all airlines start doing it, they could bring that percentage down - what are the consumers gonna do if that's the only way to get to the destination?

They still have to offer replacement flights, and if the replacement flight isn't reasonable they have to refund. They can't just keep your money.

Don't forget that a lot of flights are business flights. Fortune 500 companies will negotiate deals with the airlines, and they will ensure that getting there matters. Sure the CEO flys the company jet, but the next level down rarely does, but they talk to the CEO and will ensure that the chosen airline will get their people there by contract (wherever there is), if the airlines start failing to get people there on time these contracts will change since the large companies have enough money to matter. Those who fly a lot (again likely for business, even small businesses sometimes have someone flying several times a week) again are people the airlines need to make happy as they will go to different airline if there are problems.

Which is to say they can screw the "common man" who rarely flies, but most of the business is people who have enough power to to to airlines that treat them well and at that point it normally isn't worth screwing anyone.

I imagine the class action lawsuits at that point would bankrupt them

They were being pretty annoying, which is why the regulation went into place. The "wildness" is that they're openly trying to make it annoying again.

That was an option in the 1950s for infants. They attached a little cot to the overhead — sort of like the changing shelf on a pack and play!

The most profitable way to fill a plane would be to knock everybody out and just pile them up in the fuselage.

The current rule only applies to children under 14 years of age. They don't have to ask for teenagers.

People think I'm crazy for saying this but the only thing stopping big corporations from hiring hitmen to just actually murder people to be more profitable is that it's illegal to do so. If it were legal for them to make you put your baby in overhead luggage you bet your ass they'd be doing it if it were profitable.

I usually filter out all Basic Economy fares from my search and only look at the next tier up, where you can get seat selection at time of booking. I just figure it's a product that doesn't work for my family.

I have to pay more to select the exact seats I want on a plane, so why shouldn't you?

Think of the inverse, someone who doesn’t care about where they sit save money.

On the other hand, I never understood this obsession with grown people acting like it’s the end of the world if they don’t sit together. My wife and I fly a lot together - over a dozen trips this year - and she flies more frequently by herself. We both prefer window seats. We hardly ever sit together unless we can get 2 seats next to us by ourselves like on larger planes with a 3-2-3 combination or exit row seats in main.

I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers.

I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that.

All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.

Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes.

My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly.

Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip.

The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.

They are meaningfully different scenarios, though.

If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained.

If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child.

I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.

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.

There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you.

Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use.

If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.

I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)

> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.

I agree with both these points, though I'm much more willing to check a bag when traveling on vacation than when traveling on business. If I were to lose a bag on vacation there wouldn't be the same consequences.

On vacation I don't have my work laptop, so it's easier to toss toiletries and an emergency change of clothes in a small under-seat carry-on bag. Besides, tourists aren't expected to smell nice and look put-together, and are more likely to have a flexible schedule that would let them go shopping if the bag doesn't turn up.

Only once has the airline lost my bag while on vacation. It was only slightly annoying and they found the bag and got it to me eventually. I've seen a coworker whose bag was lost on a business trip to India. He was stuck wearing the same clothes - a tshirt and jeans - for multiple days. This included time in the office (which had a dress code) and at least one business dinner.

My wife and I are both Delta Platinum and it’s half and half. Since we always get upgraded to C+ with dedicated overhead and we board early, for non stop flights, we won’t check our bags for short getaways.

We hate lugging luggage around the airport for layovers and now that we don’t live in ATL any more, we almost always have layovers.

For me it's not having to wait at the carousel at the end, it's having to wait in that enormous line at the beginning. I really don't understand why they make it so much work just to drop off your checked bag before the flight.

I don't want to check my luggage, I had them damaged or lost more than once.

I have never had a gate checked bag where you don’t pick up your bag at baggage claim except for regional flights on small planes where even standard carry ons won’t fit in the overhead.

And for the pedantic really small planes like Sansa in Costs Rica for their 30 minute flights between San Jose and other cities.

also, don’t forget (well known fact) that passengers paying for premium economy and business class seats are the most profitable for the airlines - by far. Aside from profits from credit card rewards programs.

so the profit margin on economy tickets is likely even smaller than 5.5%!

Agreed. There should be a fee for speaking too. Some passengers are really chatty. In today's world where free speech is already being curbed, Airlines should charge a free-speech fee for passengers who plan to converse.

Separately there should be a fee for opening/closing the AC vent and using the overhead lights.

Are you a consultant for ryanair? If not, you should apply.

They tried to straight up remove the window shades, but that’s currently required by Ireland so no dice. A toilet charge has been floated but is apparently difficult both legally and technically. However given Ryanair’s usual treatment of passengers with disabilities I have no doubt a passenger with IBS would have an experience.

I think paying for water is a great opportunity. Maybe even the precious Biscoff. Especially for those cross country flights.

What about seats? You can fly standing perfectly fine. Sitting is a privilege (definitely ryanair does not propose this form time to time).

> On the one hand, this seems fair. If you want to sit together [with your family], pay for that privilege

This seems shortsighted. Airlines could get much more money if they added a fee to guarantee not to be seated beside a kid!

I'm waiting for airlines to offer a budget First Class called Number Two Class. You get exclusive use the lavatory for the entirety of the flight.

If ya made it through all three of the sentences they wrote, you'd see the comment you replied to came around to it being reasonable to give families a break on group seating.

You may not remember the coin-operated public toilets that used to be fairly common, especially in places like airports.

$99 recline your seat fee

> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another. It's seems like Mafia-tactic to seat people apart from another unless they pony up another $500 in upgrades.

The idea is that an airplane needs a certain revenue to run. Suppose it's 10k, and there are 100 passengers. Each passenger thereby pays $100.

However, some passengers (A) wish to sit in a big seat and are willing to pay for it, and others (B) don't care about seat size and are willing to give-up space for a cheaper ticket.

As such, 1 Passenger A may want to pay $250 instead to get a 30% bigger seat, while 3 passengers B give up 10% of their seat size and pay a $50 ticket. The airplane still collects $400 from 4 passengers as before, but the passengers are happier now. They have traded their individual desires, for something less valuable. A desired a bigger seat and thought $150 extra was less valuable than this bigger seat. B desired a $50 cheaper ticket and thought the smaller seat was less valuable. They traded and became happier.

You may say but nah, airlines will simply charge for bigger seats and keep the smaller seats the same price. But they don't, because they must compete with other airlines that don't. If they could do this they would've already.

For seat picking it's the same thing. A prefers to pay to sit close to a friend or partner. B doesn't care and prefers a cheaper ticket. Thus A pays a bit more, B pays a bit less.

I've always had to pay for seating as long as I can remember, I never cared enough (except long international flights), so I enjoy slightly cheaper prices than a world where there was no choice. It's not as evil as it may seem at first glance.

Checked luggage charges are mostly about price discrimination and not cost savings.

They also free up the cargo hold so they can transport mail. Speaking of which, did you know the TSA screening area is a farce?

What do you mean there is no cost? Aisle and window seats are more valuable and can be sold for more, and this would force airlines to sell them to families without any up charge they would've received from other customers

As a parent who once flew with a baby with an ear infection, I'll admit there were times I desperately wanted to be seated apart from her.

Some seats are worth more than others (aisle/window vs middle). Putting families together means giving “preferred seats” away for no premium.

> > If you want to sit together, pay for that privilege

> This is evil. There is no cost to the airline to put people who booked together next to another.

Bin-packing is tough (look at Kubernetes!). Economically, giving folks willing to sit in a random seat an extra $10 and charging folks who want to sit together $10 is a wash.

Evil is, you know, torture and genocide, not efficient allocation of limited space.

They don’t guarantee both parents are with the kid. They only guarantee that at least one parent is next to each (very young) child.

This presumably would mean you’d be feeding a random kid a bottle on long flights. God knows how they’d accommodate breastfeeding.

Agreed. Flying with my own kids, I'm constantly helping them. They struggle with headphones, opening food, fastening seat belts, being reminded to use the bathroom. Worse: they spill food, have potty training accidents, kick seats, yell, cry, and get scared. It gets easier as they get older, thankfully.

With an infant, having two caregivers within reach is huge. When flying with infant in arms there's nowhere to put the kid down, you don't have a free hand. An extra set of hands to wipe up spit-up, help adjust clothing for breastfeeding, collect the diaper bag, etc is a huge help.

The idea that parents need to pay more to help their children is cruel. I would expect people seated next to a child to end up swapping, to help the parent and to escape the noisy child. But that slows down boarding as people shuffle seats and adds anxiety that we're perfectly able to resolve.

A breast feeding infant doesn't require a seat. Children under 2 can sit on a parent's lap.

Southwest used to for all tickets, for free.

They’re eliminating it because the new CEO is trying to speed-run them out of business.

If the flight is delayed by 3 hours, you will get a refund if you cancel. This is great if the delay is long and there is a flight on a competing airline that would let you get out sooner.

They want to benefit from passengers who don’t know their rights, because they won’t request a refund.

Similar things happened to family members multiple times where their initial flight (overseas) was delayed by 6 hours, they had many issues, and nobody provided information about their rights. I told them about what to ask for and voila, $1100 refund.

Delta at least supplies a 24 hour grace period to cancel in case one made a mistake. I noticed they don't even charge cards until after this period

Some will, you just have to pay an extra fee when you buy the ticket. It is ridiculous.

> Do you want to sit next to my three-year-old?

Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.

I know that travelling with kids is really tough. I sincerely sympathize! But it’s not a surprise that a kid needs a seat next to his parents. They know when they bought the ticket that he’ll be coming along, because they’re buying the ticket. They should select the necessary seats then.

Sure, if the airline had to move flights around then 1) they should attempt to preserve group cohesion 2) in extremis folks should negotiate. But for awhile I was getting requests from late-boarders every single time I flew. That’s not an accident: they are flying on cheap tickets and trying to get extra value. I sympathize with that too! But I pay for the value I get, and I don’t appreciate social pressure to give it away.

:) tables have turned. Do you want to switch seats for a "small" fee :)

No, ok never mind, enjoy your flight.

Some of us think you're just being cheap.

Yes, exactly. They want to avoid the upcharge for seat selection so they roll the dice and hope.

Wow that sounds like pure grift.

That Biden rule never rolled out according to the article. So what would be changing?

You don't have to engage or justify staying in your seat, just say no thank you and end the conversation

Look at what flying cost before deregulation and then decide if you want to go back.

I'm flying out of the west and have to go through SLC or DEN when flying United. It's ALWAYS a PITA. Now that I think about it... I had a segment a couple years ago on United from JAX to ORD that was delayed only 5 minutes and wound up arriving 5 minutes early, so maybe east of the Rockies things are better. And my brother tells me international flights on Untied through SFO to Asia are generally pretty stable.

I bet if I looked at where flights originated, United is doing a East to West pattern and there are just fewer opportunities for cascading delays to impact people getting on the plane in the east. Comparing with Alaska, which has other problems, but hasn't canceled too many flights on me, I bet most of the flights I take originate out of SEA going south or east, so you don't have that same pattern.

Also... Southwest... I remember when it was a good airline. Just another example of what hedge funds can do to you. FWIW, they have a train at DFW now that will take you to either downtown Ft. Worth or downtown Dallas (or even Las Colinas. Or DENTON. I took a train from DFW to "downtown" DENTON once!!! The wonders never cease.) I would love to see LUV field step up it's mass trans game.

it was worse in the 80's-90's...I guess the past few years of enjoying refunds was not meant to last...

I’ve seen the movie Brazil and I wish more people had so they would have voted better.

For most perhaps, but I want to know what I'll really pay. I already know I'm going to check luggage (or not, but now that I have kids and am going for longer vacations checked bags is not something I'll do without), so I want to see the price with checked bags. Likewise I know I'm willing to pay for the legroom of economy plus (the rest of my family doesn't care, though my kids are soon hit their final growth and soon will). I've just added $1000 to my actually price, but all I see is the per person ticket price with no options...

There is a reason I took Amtrak last vacation. Too bad they doen't go do where my next vacation will be.

I literally don't fit in certain carriers' seats because my legs are longer than their seat pitch.

You want regulations on in-flight entertainment packages??

At least Google flights shows you an estimate for the airline

You can always buy an economy plus ticket.