Reference no: EM133131355

The Economic Explanation for Shrinking Airline Washrooms

For a number of years, in a typical coach-class washroom on a passenger airplane, the distance from the mirror on one side to a wall on the other measured about 84 centimetres. On newly produced jetliners now going into service, the washroom width is closer to 66 centimetres-a reduction

of more than 20 percent. 

The reason for the decrease is that the previously more "spacious" washrooms required airline companies to incur a significant opportunity cost. Reducing the widths of the forward and rear washrooms by 18 centimetres each gains half the distance required to add an extra row of seats on a typical jetliner. Airline companies can obtain the additional space for an extra row of seats by removing closets, shrinking galleys, and placing all other rows of seats a little closer together. By adding a row of seats, an airline company gains millions of dollars of additional revenue over the lifetime of a typical plane. This fact explains why these companies came to view the opportunity cost of the larger washrooms of the past as too high to continue to incur.

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