Originally Posted by
justhere
My claim is that a single seat saver doesn't necessarily devalue EBCI. I only need one EBCI purchaser to agree that the seat saver didn't affect them. I do that and your theory is disproven. To put it in probability terms, which you seem to like, what are the odds that the first EBCI purchaser on the plane wants the one seat that is being saved by someone who boarded before them? The odds are against that happening. So the majority of the time, there will be at least one EBCI purchaser who doesn't even know a seat was saved, let alone their purchase devalued.
It may be low, but it's not zero. That is what devaluation means. The higher the probability that someone gets shooed away from an otherwise empty seat, the greater the devaluation. The only way for EBCI to not be devalued at all by seat-savers is for the probability of getting shooed away being ZERO, and we know that is not the case. If it were zero, then there would be zero complaints and zero threads on the matter. That would work if the load factor is something like 60%. You have to have a sea of empty seats in order for people to claim multiple seats when they board and not irritate people boarding after them.