Delta, United Accused of Lying About Their Seats

A pair of lawsuits seeking millions of dollars from United Airlines and Delta Air Lines claims both charge extra for "window seats" without any windows. The proposed class-action lawsuits, looking to represent more than 1 million passengers at each carrier, claim plane seats that would normally have windows instead open on to a blank wall owing to the placement of interior components, like air conditioning ducts and electrical conduits, per Reuters. Yet these seats still appear as "window seats" during the booking process, when passengers may be required to pay tens or hundreds of dollars to claim them, to address a fear of flying or motion sickness, for example, the lawsuits state.

"Had plaintiffs and the class members known that the seats they were purchasing (were) windowless, they would not have selected them—much less have paid extra," reads the United complaint, per Reuters. "Delta has likely sold over a million windowless 'window seats,'" WAFB quotes the other lawsuit as saying. Other airlines, including Alaska and American, do identify windowless seats during the book process. Third-party websites like SeatGuru also flag these seats, but a lawyer at the firm that filed the two suits says "a company can't misrepresent the nature of the products it sells and then rely on third party reviews to say a customer should have known that it was lying."