Samoa Air's 'pay-as-you-weigh' concept brings focus back on obesity & its related costs

At a time when airlines are floundering in rising costs, they could at least address those stemming from passenger weight.

By Vikram Doctor, ET Bureau | Apr 07, 2013, 05.55 AM IST

BharatBhatta doesn’t have time for an interview. This Nepal-raised, Norway-based professor of economics at SognogFjordane University College apologises in an email for his inability to answer questions at the moment. “I have to tell you that I am flooded by such requests from everywhere in the world these days,” he writes, with a touch of amazement. He shouldn’t be surprised.

This is what happens when you write a paper that might have been intended only in the spirit of academic enquiry, but which happens to be on one of the most hot-button subjects in public policy these days. The rampantly increasing rates of obesity around the world, its causes and consequences for public health policy, are all matters for impassioned debate. So when you link it to aviation, another subject that most people who endure the privations of regular flying have strong views on, you are bound to get attention.

Bhatta’s paper looks at different models for airlines to charge extra for overweight passengers. The differences are operational: one model proposes directly linking the final fare to each kilo of combined personal and luggage weight; a second suggests the airline set a base rate with per-kilo discounts for those who fall below the weight and surcharges for those above; and the last is simplest of all, with just a base fare and fixed deductions and charges for those below and above a fixed range.

Growing Waistlines

Bhatta is mindful about problems of implementation — getting passengers at check-in to stand on weighing machines along with their baggage is clearly a recipe for both acrimony and delay. So he suggests this only be done randomly, with the hope that, as with ticket inspectors on Mumbai’s local trains, the shame of being caught and the cost of having to pay a penalty will compel passengers to follow the rule. What he is clear on is the justification: “A reduction of 1 kg in the weight of the plane, however, is estimated to save $3,000 in fuel worth annually,” he writes.

At a time when airlines are floundering in rising costs, they could at least address those stemming from passenger weight. This is something of a modification in the debate over fat taxes, as these obesitylinked revenues are called. The starting point has usually been from a public health perspective — the fact that obesity leads to health problems, and these became social problems as countries struggle to deal with an unhealthy, overweight population.

A recent The Economist special report on obesity points out that it “lowers workers’ productivity and in the longer term raises the risk of myriad ailments, including diabetes, heart disease, strokes and some cancers; it also affects mental health.” One report puts obesity as the cause of one-fifth of total healthcare spending in the US.

But if the problem is clear, practical solutions are not. The obvious public policy response is to treat obesity like smoking and raise taxes on it, thereby simultaneously penalising it. This presumably leads to reductions, while raising useful money for public purposes (often with the promise that this money will be used to help reduce the cause, but in fact very little from tobacco taxes has ever gone into anti-smoking campaigns). This is what has been tried by Denmark, which levied taxes on high-calorie foods, or Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, who wanted to tax sugary soft drinks.

Junk vs Low Calorie

And most of these plans fail. Denmark withdrew its levy after Danes flocked across the border to stock up on fatty foods in German supermarkets, and Bloomberg’s plans have faced opposition from the public, in the legislature and finally in the courts, which blocked implementation. Opposition comes from across the political spectrum, with right-wing advocates for individual liberties railing against the nanny state, while leftwing activists point out that the burden of fat taxes is higher on the poor.

In the developed world high-calorie foods are often cheaper, while low-calorie foods are more expensive, take longer to make (another cost) and combine with the costs of gyms (and of finding the time to exercise, rather than hold down a low-pay, long-hour job) to result in regressive revenue impact on the poor.

The further problem is that this distortion is driven by big food companies which both supply cheap junk food, and make it enticing through intense marketing, while also pushing expensive, low-calorie health food, along with the visual ideal of a slim sexy body you can get by buying these. It is a double-whammy that infuriates people like Allyson Mitchell, who calls herself a fat activist.

As she writes in an essay in the anthology Fat: the Anthropology of an Obsession: “We are pissed off at a culture that messed with our heads and told us to eat all this junk food and tempted us constantly with smells and chemicals that are meant to addict us chemically and culturally to a high-fat, high-salt diet… At the same time, we are punished when our bodies exceed the boundaries of ‘proper’ and ‘good’.’’ This fury makes activists blind to the Bloomberg argument that they are, at least, trying to legislate against such food companies, which spend huge amounts campaigning against such restrictions.

Sifting Through the Fat

Fat tax proponents like Bloomberg also face a problem in what might seem like the model for their campaign — the anti-smoking movement which managed to stigmatise and reduce a business-promoted addictive behaviour. The problem is that smoking is an entirely elective addiction, since we don’t have to do it to live, but we have to eat. And what we eat is also complicated, and involves cultural factors that can’t be so easily excised from our lives. Not all foods are bad foods, and even high-calorie foods aren’t bad in moderation, and sometimes one just has to. Some years back the Taj group announced it was banning the use of ghee on health grounds. But ghee is not necessarily unhealthy and it is essential for certain types of Indian food and in the end it seems this policy has quietly been discontinued.

The consequence of all these confusions is that framing public policy to tackle obesity has become a quagmire. Everyone acknowledges the problem, but it seems almost impossible to agree on effective solutions other than education campaigns that are excellent at making us feel guilty, but seem to be agonisingly slow to work. As most people who try to lose weight sadly learn, our genetic disposition to eat more and store fat is usually for more hardwired than our more recent compulsions to eat less and work out. For all that people acknowledge the dangers of obesity, public opinion is usually firmly against fat taxes framed in Bloomberg’s terms.

Simple, But There are Sceptics

But this is what is interesting about Bhatta’s approach. Its ultimate aim is the same as Bloomberg’s but public opinion is on his side. A survey of 1,000 respondents by online travel portal Skyscanner after Bhatta’s proposals came out showed that 59% agreed that airlines were justified in charging extra for very overweight passengers. Partly, of course, this is because flying is elective, not necessary, but it also seems to help frame the issue in ostensibly practical terms (fuel cost) rather than as an emotive issue about health risks and guilt. It also helps that many fliers can vividly relate to sitting in already cramped economy seats next to a really large person who squashes into their own seat space. Airlines are acting on this.

Samoa Air, a carrier from the Pacific islands which have seen dramatic rises in general obesity, has announced it is moving to a pay-as-youweigh (PAYW) system, in what looks like the most direct form proposed by Bhatta. Passengers booking on the Samoa Air site must enter their weight (personal plus luggage) and the fare is calculated at rates ranging from $1-4.16 per kilo depending on the distance. Speaking to an Australian radio, Chris Langton, the head of Samoa Air points out this has turned out to be popular with families with children — because of the smaller size of the kids, the average cost for these families comes down. Charging by weight was “the concept of the future”, he said.

Not everyone is convinced. For example, taller but fit people come off worse with this policy, unless the ground staff doing checkin were equipped with charts to calculate body mass index, a ratio that adjusts weight for height for a better definition of obesity. Also, while weight-based pricing might work for Samoa Air which operates smaller aircraft (on which, Langton noted, the effects of obesity are more apparent) with relatively few flights and passengers, it is hard to imagine it in operation at the scale and throughput of large international carriers, or even most Indian ones.

No Easy Answers

Bhatta acknowledges this: “Implementing this option may also incur high transaction costs,” he writes about his first model. This is why he has come up with modified versions, but even more to the point, he notes that many airlines do charge more for passenger weight in special circumstances. Southwest Airlines, for example, has a policy that if a passenger is so large that the seat rest can’t be brought down, then he or she must pay for a second seat.

This is somewhat modified if the flight is not full — the passenger is either placed next to an empty seat or, if they have already bought the second seat then that cost is reimbursed. This is a sane approach to an emotive issue since it tries to balance the interests of both regular and overweight — who could, in a monetary pinch, wait for a less full flight.

Indian airlines may not have formalised the policy as Southwest has, but this is essentially how they operate as well. A SpiceJet spokesperson says they try and block the seat next to the overweight passenger, but “if the flight is full then they need to pay basic fare for two seats and taxes for one”. Jet and IndiGo spokespeople say they have no process for asking overweight passengers to pay extra, but they can choose to buy an extra seat if needed. There are never any easy answers in debates over public health issues like obesity, but it helps to move away from emotive elements to more practical solutions on the lines suggested in Bhatta’s paper.

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