Women can choose not to sit next to men on any IndiGo flight. The feature could attract more female customers to the airline.
India's largest budget carrier, IndiGo, is the first airline to trial a feature that lets female passengers book seats next to other women to avoid sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a man in a move designed to make flying more comfortable for female passengers, according to a CNBC report.
The airline's booking process is fairly standard except for the seat map which highlights seats occupied by women with the color pink. This information is not visible to male passengers, according to the airline, CNBC reported. IndiGo did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch's request for comment on the new feature.
The cargo holds on commercial flights are pressurized and heated. I can't imagine passengers would take kindly to their luggage being subjected to 0.3x atmospheric pressure at -55°C.
They could, the cargo hold is pressurized, if you fly with animals like a dog, they go in the cargo hold too. Just dont forget to give them something to eat on long flights
Edit: actually though, I wouldn't mind being seated in something like a "family" section. It really is hard to keep babies and toddlers still and quiet on a plane (or anywhere), and I always feel bad for the people sitting next to us.
I rather have a toddler continously kick my seat on a long haul flight than dealing with a overly "friendly" and intrusive guy who thinks its his right to bother me for 12 hours because I'm stuck there.
Do Indian men have a reputation for being inappropriately forward with women? There was a meme that read “every app is a dating app if you’re Indian enough”
"Inappropriately forward" is a very polite way to put it. I feel like at least once a month there's a new story out of India about a gang rape or something.
Have you like, ignored every second piece of information coming out of india the last decades?
They have a terrible issue with misogyny, there are countless stories of rape and other forms of assault on any kind of women (and girls). Indians, foreigners, none are safe, even with men accompanying them for protection. One or two guys can't do much against a rape mob.
India is probably the first country I would warn a woman away from if she were looking for vacation destinations. Followed by islamic countries.
My wife got invited to a wedding in India and I was not invited (long story). She asked the bride if it was safe to travel to the wedding alone and she straight up said "No. You should find a travel buddy."
Yeah my sister went to India a few years back by herself and while thankfully nothing terrible happened to her, she said she would never go back. Just walking around she said the streets are majority men and they are not shy about staring at any woman (especially someone who was clearly a foreigner). Of course, parts of the trip were cool but definitely not the place to be travelling alone as a woman.
Mm idk about that. Yes there is a lot of violence against women in India. Generally, the Indians flying are not gonna be the ones doing that. Secondly, there is a lot of violence against women all over the world, it's not just an India thing. Hell half the US political system is trying to give women the death penalty for the consequences of being raped. Or just for deciding they don't want kids.
As far as I know, yes. The Internet has taught me to not bring a woman with me if I ever go to the Holi festival in India. I've never been to India, I hope the internet is wrong but I had an Indian coworker who told me the same thing.
You could look up the gulabi gang. It's a group of women who fight to protect other women from violence.
Edit - I think it's best if we listen to Indian women speak on the problem. The first time I heard about the gulabi gang and why they exist I was horrified.
Others commented about misogyny etc. in India miss the fact that India is (a) not a monolith & (b) flights are too expensive for 80% of India's population (yes, wealth disparity in India is that bad). So the men on flights are less likely to grope women than let's say a man on a train.
I asked my Indian colleagues about this, and they said they'd use this preference for space (not purely safety). One of them also said men smell worse than women so she'd prefer a woman next to her.
I've been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.
Nice. I had been using the analogy that an introvert at a party acts as a sacrificial anode consuming corrosive extroversion until they are utterly exhausted. But I like your take on it!
I don't see the issue here. Most other indian transport has female sections. That is a normal part of public transportation there.
They do not "segregate". Its not like the whole plane is split into male and female zones. They just saying "Hey, if you feel more comfortable sitting with women, we got you."
I would probably not chose it on purpose, but i can see, how it can be a more relaxed experience for other women.
Not to sure(feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but afaik Theres a quite big amount of rapes and sexual assaults happening in India so not being forced to sit next to a creep may be a good thing.
TBH even as a man I’d prefer to sit not with other men. They are bigger, for one thing. And overall less considerate, though of course they have no monopoly on that.
I want seats next to nobody. How hard will that be to pull off?
Just be a man on a flight full of women.
(No snark intended there - I'm neither a danger to any woman I sit next to, NOR offended if no women sit next to a strange man (me) they don't know on a flight - but I definitely see an upside where maybe in some circumstances I get an empty seat next to me that I would not have had.)
On the one hand, I really am against any of these I don't want to be near men/women/brown people/minority, bit on the other hand, Indian men are the worst when it comes to showing respect to women. This ranges from reading the news on gangrape (reading any article you can assume "India" and be right about 60% of the time) to my wife walking on the street being followed by groups of Indian guys who apparently just never learned how to behave around women.
Honestly I think in most cases segregation is just not the answer.
The more far away we become based on fairly arbitrary characteristics, the less there is opportunity for a meaningful dialogue that would change the status quo around the issue.
On a practical side, I wish there were proper passenger safety measures and procedures against harassment. A man is trying to do that to you? Record it and report to the crew immediately, and let them deal with the perpetrator and call police on the ground when applicable.
I get what you're saying, but we don't fix the issue of men sexually assaulting women, especially in a country that has such profound issues with this like India, by forcing women to remain vulnerable.
If allowing women to avoid being seated next to men on flights reduces the chance of sexual assault from taking place during flights, then I am all for it.
It just needs to be understood as a harm reduction technique, not the solution to the overall societal problem.
This is like saying cars shouldn't have seatbelts because it isn't discouraging people not to crash their cars. Seatbelts don't solve this issue, they just reduce harm. Think of this airline's decision as implementing a sexual seatbelt for women.
My concern is that the same men, frustrated at being unable to do this on flight, will do it somewhere else anyway. Also, some could be pissed off by this measure just enough to have a negative shift in mentality towards women (see incels that are driven by alientation). So does it really significantly reduce harm? I'd love to see numbers if anyone has got them.
What you're describing is a big hassle, and at the end of the day a confrontation and poor customer experience still happened making that customer think twice before flying again.
Okay but then men are allowed to fart openly and take our shirts off in the no-women section while they drink chamomile tea and read thought provoking books about how they are okay just the way they are.
The airline's booking process is fairly standard except for the seat map which highlights seats occupied by women with the color pink. This information is not visible to male passengers, according to the airline, CNBC reported.
What's to stop a man from claiming to be female to see the map of where women are sitting, and then booking an adjacent seat themselves?
On Indian flights you can pay to choose your seat or let the operator choose for you for free. I suspect the latter is where the preference choice comes in. So there won't be a question of seeing where women are sitting.
You pick your seat after the booking process, where you have to enter your details which does include sex. Even if you enter it wrong just to pick a seat you won't be able to enter the airport because they check that at the gate. Whether you are the same person whose ticket you are carrying.
I was thinking first would be the fake booking to find where the women were sitting, then switch browsers/clear cookies/whatever and book with the real details.
I'd assume Indian airlines has an ID check,l and men aren't going to get a surgery and go through the process of changing their legal gender just to creep on women. This is also the same argument used against trans people in the bathroom debate, and while you probably didn't mean to, you are parroting the ideas of transphobes.
I mean I don't want to sit next to a man either, for some reason they tend to be offensive even if they don't feel like they have to talk to me for some reason. I also don't really want to sit next to anyone because it feels akward trying not to make eye contact or feeling like I have to say somehing. Most of all though no kicking children behind me. Fuck just introduce boxed in seats so I can fly in silence and solitude. Or don't, I probably can't afford travel for the rest of my life.
2 times had different guys that smelled weirdly like literal shit, one time ranting about dumb maga shit like he thought he could convert me, the other one just being all around invasive and reaching over me to point both air things at him and adjust the window multiple times without asking.