Off the top of my head, the only loco airlines in Europe who do not currently offer allocated seating are Easyjet, Ryanair and Wizzair. There may be more (BMIbaby?) but I've never flown with them. In some respects it's relatively rare not to offer it. It's just that the large volume of passengers they collectively carry make 'the scrum' seem more normal than it actually is.
No, just those three although i wasn't aware Wizzair had non allocated seating I must admit.
Air Asia made the move to allocated seating on their short haul operations a few years ago. It didn't make that much of a difference to the length of time boarding takes, but it did make the process much less stressful. Personally I feel that this makes good business sense. Less stress equals more happiness, which equals more repeat custom, which equals fatter bottom lines. It could also be argued that happy passengers are more likely to part with cash once the aircraft is airbourne. Allocated seating is also a unique selling point which would distinguish Easyjet from several of its competitors.
Great business decision. From my previous posts you will know that it is a good move IMO. However, the "scrum" is usually exaggerated in my experience and has almost become a cliche. Some stations are worse than others but most are generally orderly. Where the inconvenience comes is the queuing in the terminal long before boarding, sometimes before the inbound has arrived. A lot of Easyjet boarding is done through airbridge and there is little noticable difference in terms of how people behave when they are used.
Moving to allocated seating allowed Air Asia to start exploiting other ancilliary revenue streams. Apart form the obvious (charging pax to select seats), Air Asia started offering extras such as hot meals, tax free shopping and inflight entertainment during the booking process. Such a move would be difficult without allocated seating as cabin crew would not know who had ordered what and where they were sat.
Inflight devices being trialled at MAN base on certain (generally A320) routes and apparently to be rolled out at LGW. Tax Free (Duty Free on Non-EU) has existed for years. Hot snacks have also been sold for years but hot meals won't happen and pre-booking things just adds complexity and layers in cost for the airline.
Onboard sales are important for Easyjet and there are certain bases and routes (especially Northern England/Northern Ireland/Scotland) that make lots of money. Indeed, longer routes such as SSH are very lucrative for crew and company. You have the time, and we do do IFE, Champagne, bar, snacks, shopping and cigarettes and spirits and it can very much resemble a charter flight 10/15/20 years ago. However, Easyjet's network is pretty much the most diverse short haul network in the whole world. It takes in the longer distance sun destinations, the typical shorter med routes, domestics, city's and VFR routes. So whilst replicating what you suggest is great on the MAN-SSH it doesn't work on the LGW-AMS and certainly not on some of the MXP/MAD based routes where passengers spend very little onboard. And even with that diversity, there is still a need for simplicity.
I see your point, I agree it would be great and I have pondered those ideas before but simplicity is really the name of the game at Easy and credit where credit is due, they have made a strong financial perfomance under one of the worst economic downturn we have ever seen.