irishguy28

Not having flown at all in recent months, I just noticed that on an upcoming reservation, set to go over to airport control shortly, all the aisle seats in the "regular economy" rows of an Embraer 175 have now, suddenly, all been blocked.

I assume this is evidence of some attempt at enforcing "social distancing" and to limit the chances of unrelated passengers ending up seated together. (That said, for the last few months, the seatmap showed that I would have a seatmate, rubbing shoulders right beside me in one of the Economy Comfort rows, until the curtain moved forward a few days back and I was able to seat myself further forward, in blissful isolation!)

Have you spotted any similar attempts at seat-blocking in your travels? It's just that I have never seen such a pattern on any KL booking before; they have yet to do the same on the return leg, but this blocking only occurred sometime earlier today.

johan rebel

No, I have not. Not before OLCI, nor after.

As an aside, I wonder who came up with the brilliant term "social" distancing. Surely what we are talking about here is physical distancing? For most people these days the easiest way by far to achieve genuine social distancing would be to close their FB, Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram accounts.

Johan

irishguy28

Ah, but if we ditched our social media, then KLM couldn't run their "Meet & Seat" programme anymore!!! (I guess they stopped that some time ago, I really pay no attention!)

tecate55

I think they’re trying to spread passengers as much as they can. I’ve seen their available/occupied/blocked maps bounce around a lot: KLM "Seat Not Available" meaning?


When I did my own OLCI, the map looked very different than what I saw in a hypothetical booking like in my screenshots above.


I suspect blocking is manually controlled, so they open things up as seats are sold and re-configure availability. Sometimes a family of 2,3,4,5 wants to sit together, so you’ll see contiguous seats opened up as well so they can choose without calling in for an unblock.

My E190 AMS-Toulouse flight was 100% full, so I’d imagine they are willing to unblock all seats if necessary. But I didn’t check-in early enough to witness blocking.

Goldorak

I haver seen this also with AF (Hop) on E190. But as the flights are very full, it doesn't matter as at the end you will have a seat mate.

amstotheworld

I have seen this too, on 2 out 4 flights last month. Interestingly enough, all flights were more or less equally full (85-90%) and many of those blocked seats were certainly occupied...