The market has been doing a terrible job of making such considerations visible. I'd like to book a flight from city A to city B on an A380. There are two possible routes on two different carriers, and I'm happy to pay the (fairly small) premium.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to actually do that, to manually go and find the flight times and numbers that correspond to an A380, and then to find those in a search engine (either Kayak or the airlines')? Especially when there's a stopover. Both airlines have a ton of other flights on the same route, which is just noise that I have to filter through. But I'm willing to spend a couple hours doing that to book a slightly less miserable transatlantic flight.
If comfort information was readily available and visible on a flight search, people would actually be able to make that choice. But it's not, so it's not reasonable to draw the conclusion that people don't care about it. It's not easy to research the differences, to the vast majority probably don't know them.
Again, the market does a terrible job of making such considerations visible because not enough consumers care. It's not like online travel agencies don't want to distinguish themselves or airlines don't want people to know they're operating A380s
There shouldn't be any difficulty in adding an "A380" filter to a search engine (even for third parties, it's a field in the schedules datasets), but the set of people searching for flights mostly by aircraft type, on routes where A380s actually operate isn't necessarily larger than the set of people who will check the A380 box out of curiosity, be surprised at how few options they get and then book on a different site.
It's perhaps telling that SeatGuru, with its excellent and unique rich data on airline seating, comes with a pretty bog standard search tool.
The market has been doing a terrible job of making such considerations visible. I'd like to book a flight from city A to city B on an A380. There are two possible routes on two different carriers, and I'm happy to pay the (fairly small) premium.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to actually do that, to manually go and find the flight times and numbers that correspond to an A380, and then to find those in a search engine (either Kayak or the airlines')? Especially when there's a stopover. Both airlines have a ton of other flights on the same route, which is just noise that I have to filter through. But I'm willing to spend a couple hours doing that to book a slightly less miserable transatlantic flight.
If comfort information was readily available and visible on a flight search, people would actually be able to make that choice. But it's not, so it's not reasonable to draw the conclusion that people don't care about it. It's not easy to research the differences, to the vast majority probably don't know them.