Delta Air Lines and United Airlines were sued this week by passengers claiming they paid extra to sit in “window” seats, but were instead assigned to sit next to a windowless wall.
According to the proposed class action lawsuits filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court and Brooklyn, New York federal court, the two airlines breached their contracts by misleading customers, charging them for window seats but placing them in the gaps between the windows without effectively disclosing the seat placement to the passengers.
“United specifically represented to the Plaintiffs and class members that the particular seats they chose had a ‘window,’ even though United knew full well they did not,” one complaint said. “Nevertheless, United solicited, accepted, and retained cash, points, or other airline benefits that consumers specifically paid to sit next to a window.”
A separate complaint uses similar language to describe customers’ alleged experience with Delta. The lawsuits said that beyond being an amenity passengers paid more for, window seats can help alleviate motion sickness or soothe cranky children, among other benefits.
Of United’s more than 1,000 aircraft, many are Boeing 737-series and Airbus A321-series planes that contain at least one windowless seat—usually 10A, 11A, or 12A—according to the lawsuits. Delta’s smaller fleet has a similar composition of aircraft with these windowless configurations, usually the result of the patterns of internal air conditioning duction or electrical conduits. The lawsuits said each airline sold more than one million windowless seats over the last four years.
United declined Fortune’s request for comment. Delta did not respond to a request for comment.
Grievances toward seat fees
Seat fees—such as having to pay more to sit by a window seat or exit row—among other baggage and flight change fees, are a strategy used by airlines to increase revenue while keeping the base price for flights lower. American, Delta, United, Frontier, and Spirit airlines made $12.4 billion in seat fee revenue between 2018 and 2023, according to a November 2024 report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Delta got 0.3% of its revenue from the fees in 2023; seat fees similarly made up 2.6% of United’s revenue the same year. The investigation was part of a Biden-era push to increase airline transparency of hidden fees.
According to the lawsuits, United can charge $50 for window seat assignment on domestic flights and $100 for some international flights, while Delta passengers must pay up to $40 to reach a higher ticket tier, at which point they would need to pay more than $30 to pick their window seat. These upcharges for features airlines can allegedly not deliver on are part of the larger problem of airlines heaping invisible fees onto passengers, according to Carter Greenbaum, one of the lawyers who filed the two lawsuits
“Consumers are rightfully angry that they continue to be charged for fees and for services that were once free and included and that companies are not up front with how much products cost,” Greenbaum told Fortune. “Consumers are tired of junk fees, and that’s a bipartisan issue.”
Delta has seen the double-edged sword of offering too many amenities to upper-middle-class customers, navigating annoyance from patrons about overcrowded lounges that were freshly updated with fine dining and valet services at the beginning of the year. Legislators have also scrutinized Delta’s move to individually price tickets using AI, warning it could lead to “predatory pricing.” The airline said the pricing would be “publicly filed and based solely on trip-related factors.”
Pushes to increase transparency
While passengers can use sites like SeatGuru to view aircraft seat maps and assess whether their seat will actually be next to a window, Greenbaum said the onus should still be on the airline to be transparent with customers about the reality of their seat conditions.
“A company cannot 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,” Greenbaum said. “If third parties are able to effectively crowdsource this information, there’s really no excuse for United and Delta to not be transparent about the nature of the premium upgrade that they’re selling to customers.”
Airlines have previously gotten in trouble for allegedly promising customers services they could not deliver on. In 2018, U.S. Airways paid a $9.85 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit alleging the airline did not immediately refund a checked baggage service fee after passenger luggage was lost, damaged, or delayed. The current cases against Delta and United are even more “extreme” than the 2018 lawsuit, Greenbaum said. In each of the lawsuits he filed, there are 100 people in each class with an aggregated $10 million in claims.
“In this case,” he said, “they have quite literally sold customers a window seat without a window.”