Airline Travel in Vekllei

Part of the bulletin series of articles

Summary

• Most people in Vekllei do not use money and are essentially unbanked. This raises interesting problems of fairness in cases of scarcity.
• As a common example of how ticketing works in Vekllei, we can look to airlines and how they allocate seats.
• Air travel is generally accessible to ordinary Vekllei people. Commonwealth Airways helps connect the distant republics of Vekllei and emphasise their shared values.
• Most flights use a simple 80/20 system, where 80% of seats are available six months out and 20% are allocated based on need.

Almost every Vekllei person flies, and some fly frequently. The country is simply too big and its islands too disparate to commute by ship regularly. Almost always, they fly with Commonwealth Airways, their national airline, which does not charge a fare for the unmoneyed and unbanked Commonwealth population.

The process for booking is this:

1. Up to six months prior, seats on a flight are booked on a first-come, first-served basis. On most domestic routes, demand is usually well-calculated and it’s usually pretty easy to get a seat. In the holiday months, international routes can be more competitive.¹
2. Some seats on the aircraft are reserved for priority transit. The number of seats reserved depends on the route and aircraft type, and ranges between 10-20%.
3. Priority transit encompasses a range of travel, including emergency or well-founded reasons for travel like bereavement or medical fares, as well as important business and government seats. In Vekllei, ‘business class’ is not a seperate class domestically but a special ticket.
4. As the flight approaches, reserved seats are made available on a linear curve that depends on the route. There is always at least two reserved seats on a Commonwealth Airways flight right up until departure, which are sometimes used by air marshals or airline staff.

Any Vekllei person can fly for any time – booking history is assigned to a customer number associated with a government ID. This information is centralised and used internally for research purposes. International routes serviced by Commonwealth Overseas Airways also take on international paying customers, who purchase from the same 80/20 pool of seats.