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Often when booking flights the plane is listed as having wingtips. For example, it would say 737 (wingtips). I get what the wingtips are for, but what is the purpose of telling the passengers that the plane has them at time of booking?

Michael Stachowsky
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  • What airline are you seeing this for? – Ron Beyer Oct 31 '18 at 02:29
  • @RonBeyer KLM's (for example) fleet list used to list those 738s that had been retrofitted with winglets as such when this retrofitting program was underway. When the program was complete, the information was dropped. This would show up on flight schedules as something like "Boeing 737-800 (winglets)". – jwenting Oct 31 '18 at 05:22

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This is nothing but a silly marketing exercise. Wingtips (or rather winglets: all airplanes have wingtips:) are seen by the public as a cool and very visible feature, characteristic of newer models. So perhaps they want to say that our airplane is new, and not the 1968 model with the same designation.

Zeus
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    I doubt it's even really meant as a marketing feature so much as the database of aircraft types happens to identify the aircraft that way, and that's what ends up getting displayed to the passenger unintentionally. – Zach Lipton Oct 31 '18 at 04:59