Seating Groups on Aircraft

Have you walked the length of an aircraft during a long flight and noticed different moods and vibes?

Maybe it was the lighting in some regions or business travelers talking shop and everyone typing away. Depending on your destination, some areas seem more like a party or a movie theatre. Hopscotch Solutions takes the group seating concept another step with a group reseating API.

Group Reseating

Let's say you need to seat multiple groups of people together on a full flight. Would you handle families differently from business associates? Does one group have priority over the other? Would there be any bias in your methodology? Would you pick and choose who to help? In what order would you help them?

We can reframe this as an "unavailable seat inventory" situation because it affects high load factor flights in need of a real-time reseating request system. This situation impacts more than families. Group reseating can result in departure delays. Reseating groups together also includes:

• Athletic teams,
• Organized tours,
• Families,
• Business associates,
• Friends and acquaintances,
• Like-minded travelers.

Before considering our options as passenger and airline, let's restate the problem. The key concepts are:

• Groups: plural, so we have more than one set with multiple passengers.
• Seated Together: a vague spatial term for close quarters aboard an aircraft.
• Full Flight: no available unassigned seats.

Okay, the outlook begins to seem a little bleak. Let's look at options for a non-confrontational and friendly resolution in a timely manner. We are essentially left with:

1. Do nothing and accept that it's a full flight.
2. Ask for reseating volunteers before boarding.
3. Board the aircraft and ask nearby passengers.
4. Ad-hoc bartering.

Considering the options, the tradeoffs are messy. We previously covered this in another post, so now let's consider potential solution strategies. We came up with these:

• Find solo travelers wishing to move and accept the likelihood their seat is far from the others.
• Focus on just one group and negotiate on behalf but neglect the other groups.
• Seek the "low hanging fruit" and limit our search to moving one passenger at a time.

Even with others we missed, each strategy comes with its own drawbacks, including:

• Imposition on other passengers, 
• Incurring a flight delay, 
• Inability to find nearby seats, 
• Handling groups sequentially, or
• Distracting your flight crew. 

We think the aforementioned strategies were suboptimal when attempting to satisfy all requests concurrently and iteratively while simultaneously avoiding delays and passenger regret. There must be a better strategy to solve this (there is).

Reseating Use Cases

What images came to mind as you read, "groups of people", and, "seated together"? Did you envision departure gate chaos or calm? Do you picture throngs of passengers overwhelming a gate agent? Did you envision several peaceful, quiet and orderly negotiations in hushed voices? This situation happens everyday producing varying outcomes each consuming time and effort.

This blog considers situations where we look at the roles of both passenger and airline. That's because the problem domain includes multiple parties of multiple passengers. We looked for unaddressed scenarios to design a robust solution for both sides. A previous post discussed how model diagrams kept our design focused on passenger requests and responses within system boundaries and real world limitations.

Use cases included actors such as passenger, flight attendant, gate agent, ticketing agent and other ground crew. We considered both internal and external actors, like the overhead storage bin as well as other electronic system actors and internal micro-service API's.

One of the earliest questions we received from passengers was regarding exchanging stowage areas as well as boarding sequence. Our model simplifications excluded these because you purchase them separately from your reservation and they do not "transfer" unless the airline reissues your group's boarding passes.

Aircraft Neighborhoods

Passenger answers surprised us when we asked about their concept of "travel group". Responses included families with subgroups we had not imagined. It turned out that families with children old enough to sit together without a parent often want to sit apart, but not "too far apart". Parents explained that sometimes they needed to be together and a bit apart from their group.

Let's reconsider a reseating definition of the words "group" and "together". We recognized the need for reseating neighborhoods of people together and included "close enough" to satisfy the vague spatial requirement and still suffice, as in real life.

The concept expanded as neighborhoods or areas that would include like-minded travelers aboard the aircraft. It reminded us of the experience of walking down the aircraft mid-flight and noticing the subtle changes. Hopscotch Solutions API passengers could request neighborhood seating areas. For example some neighborhoods could be:

• Quiet Area: solo travelers with headphones.
• No Recline: sitting upright only without the domino-effect.
• Road Warrior: keyboard clacking, eyes focused on your own screen.
• Snooze: closed window shades for power naps free from screen glare.
• Movie Zone: catching up on movies with the glow of mobile device screens.
• Gaming Zone: gamers with the gaming passion.
• Library: for those having a good read, uninterrupted.
• Other multi-party groups.

We group these passenger reseating requests on an as-needed basis, in near real-time prior to boarding. You probably had this situation happen before without a way to find and consolidate others. If we create such neighborhood seating areas on the fly, what would the seat map look like? We came up with Figure 1, shown below.

Figure 1: Group Seat Clustering Output