Originally Posted by
cooperplace
Thank you for your correction re the numbers. I prefer an A320 over a 737 any day. And I spend a lot of time in both, as passenger.
i don't care if the plane is made in France or Washington state.
I don't much care myself either, although I can't say that I've noticed the AirBusses are substantially wider. Still, the Airline/Aircraft/Seat width chart I looked at shows that the Airbus does, on the average across airlines have a half an inch wider seats, so that's something. The thing is (and I think this ties into DavidReid's post) *you* may be vitally interested in things like seat width, and place that high in your list of criteria for choosing an airline, but for the most part, travelers don't, it's a long way below a small price difference. Passengers make a lot of noise complaining about seat size, but when it comes time to click the "buy" button, they are driven primarily by price. That's how we have arrived at the current state of affairs. Airlines have been reducing seat pitch and width for long time. If passengers were truly as interested in seat size as they claim, the first airline to reduce seat size would have discovered that a significant portion of their passengers were going to their competitors, who had not reduced the seat size, and that trend would have been stopped as an unprofitable strategy. But that's not what happened, airlines kept making seats smaller and smaller and people still kept on buying tickets. If seat width was a a significant driving factor in purchasing airline tickets, all the seats on Airbus 320's would all be 1.1666" wider than all the seats on 737's and Airbus and the airlines would be making that fact well known, and Boeing wouldn't have sold many 737's after the 320 got rolling.