Airlines are making plane seats more uncomfortable – and it will sneakily cost you more money

PLANE seats are hardly comfy at the best of times, but airlines could be making things worse to encourage you to spend more money.

There are plenty of ways airlines can get customers to pay extra for their flights, be it through luggage fees, priority boarding or other crafty methods.

One of the more lucrative ways is through upgrades, with newer upgrade options tempting people to part with their cash to avoid economy class seating.

It's hardly surprising that people want to pay for the upgrades either, with airlines seemingly doing all they can to make economy class seats the last place a passenger would want to sit.

Some people have accused them of doing this through a process called "densification".

This involves finding new ways to squeeze as many people as they can into their cabins, while charging the same, or possibly even more, despite the seats being smaller and less comfortable.

Travel news site explained: "Such is the demand for adding more seats in the economy cabin that Airbus last year implemented a New Production Standard for the A350 aircraft.

"They have chiselled the sidewalls on the aircraft differently to find four extra inches of space, which will allow ten abreast 'comfortably'.

"With all the changes, the airlines can add another 30 seats on the A350-1000." 

Along with these changes is an increase in the number of "premium economy" options available with different airlines.

explained that, sadly, people simply find themselves having to pay extra for what they used to be able to expect in a normal economy seat.

To get passengers to do that, airlines are making the economy experience less bearable.

They said: "What airlines seem to be doing is ploughing money into marketing premium economy seats as the new luxury-but-still-within-reach upgrade option for low- and middle-income travellers.

"The sting in the tail here, however, is that the way to make premium economy seats seem more appealing to customers is to actively make their economy offering less enticing.

"How? By packing in more seats to the same amount of cabin space — ‘densification’. This way, premium economy and business class — the higher value tickets — become far more enticing than economy."

For the majority of us who simply have no option other than to book economy seats, there are ways to make the experience a little better without paying a load extra for an upgrade.

One of those is to not pick seats directly next to one another when booking a flight as a pair.

Instead, pick the window and the aisle seats, leaving the middle seat free.