Ryanair made 4yr old sit alone

You get what you paid for...

You've been living under a rock if you don't know you need to book seats together if you want to sit together.

No sympathy, except for whoever was unfortunate enough to be beside your 4 year old.

That is awful. It's one thing to seat people apart of there are no seats to be allocated but to do this on purpose when their policy is to seat children u12 with adults is crazy.

RyanAir didn't make your 4 year old sit alone .
You were offered a free seat for the children and you didn't just buy the adult seat beside said free seat .
So it was completely your fault .

You're right in this circumstance but it bugs me when people quote guidance/law that applies to a different territory. Both the CAA and EASA however use the word should and not must allowing wiggle room for the airlines.

I don't think this is real. Every time I have booked a Ryanair flight with my now 4 year old it had automatically added the extra seat cost for the adults in the party and we've had to choose seats together and pay.

It's exactly the same. At present you don't have to pay extra on a bus to stay with your family. Until recently you didn't on planes. It was just normal practice that airlines would sit families together. Some American budget airlines are first come first served- saves a lot of faffing around.

Seating families together is much safer as well in case of plane crashes. I don't understand how on MN, people are quick to defend a profiteering charge that endangers human life.

Also bizarrely on MN, people seem to think this extra charge, made up only to screw passengers over, is sacrosanct and must be paid, and anyone who doesn't is a BAD parent and should be reported to Social Services. There is no extra cost to airlines in seating people together. If no-one paid it, they would not be able to keep charging it. I've never paid it and I am almost always seated next to my family.

You made your DCs sit alone because you didn't rebook and prepay for seats. Your actions or lack of them caused this issue and nothing else.

But why didn't you pay for seats together?

I boycotted Ryanair years ago. They do everything to make your flight shit so they can then squeeze more money out of you as you attempt to make the experience more bearable. By the time you have paid to get to Stansted at some god awful time, paid for a seat, paid for luggage and paid for anything else they have thought of, you might as well fly on a better airline.

Thing is though I do think the airline are irresponsible by leaving it to the last minute and shoving the faff onto cabin crew. It takes much longer than someone using their brain to review seat allocation the day before and if necessary shifting some pre-bookers around.

We were on a flight where a mum and two oldish children hadn’t booked seats so steward needed to find 3 in proximity. We were delayed taking off by over an hour because the reallocation was left to the air steward and no-one wanted to move. He eventually moved a lady who said she was disabled with her child who had an extra seat (her husband hadn’t traveled for some reason). It all kicked off big time- she was claiming discrimination and theft of her spare seat, everyone was getting pissed off and it was just unpleasant all round. But.. I blame easy jet and not the family or steward as they left the crew in a shift situation that should have been sorted before boarding.

If it matters to you to sit together, you are unreasonable not to reserve your seats when you book and pay the same as other people. If I've paid for my seat, I'm only moving if the offer is a swap to an even better seat.

Didn't know this. But isn't the guidance the same irrespective of CAA or EASA?

If a child travels with an accompanying adult in the same class of cabin, the

child should be seated in the same seat row segment as the accompanying adult. Where this is
not possible, the child should be seated no more than one seat row or aisle away.

You should have paid to pre book seats when making the booking. Yes, it’s not ideal but it’s how Ryanair work and it’s not like it’s a new thing. YABU expecting other passengers to move to accommodate you.

A pp said about RA charging for the loo if they could. He tried it. I'm guessing as it was 15 years ago, nowt came of it.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/05/ryanair-toilet-charge

Sorry OP but as crap as it is, you need to pay for allocated seats if you book with Ryanair. They usually still work out as the cheapest option when you pay the extra anyway. I definitely wouldn’t risk it with young children.

You wouldn’t want to move seats if you’d paid for the privilege of sitting with your family so there’s not much that can be done by the staff on a full flight.

This is pretty outrageous. I’ve had the same situation with British Airways before when there was a problem with online check in and we couldn’t sit together as by the time we got to the airport, there weren’t enough seats left for us to be a x4 or two x2. They assured us they’d sort it due to having the same policy (or is it actually a legal requirement?) and they did. I was so relieved.

Similarly our flight was cancelled recently and we were put onto a different flight with a booking made about 2 hours before departure time. I had to ask a man to swap with me so I could sit with my husband and young children. Fortunately he was very relaxed about it which I really appreciated. Unfortunately some people are very unkind and make a point of being difficult.

Why didn't you book your seats in advance? That's absolutely an option with TUI.

Yes, this.

It is not that you get free reserved seats if you have young children, it's that you should PAY to sit together. Like everyone else has to. So why oh why did you think you could just get things for free when you turned up?

I wish pp would stop quoting CAA guidance for Ryanair, they're governed by EASA since they're headquartered in the EU.
Yes RyanAir are shit, you get what you pay for

We had something similar for summer hols. Not Ryanair, TUI and booked through travel agent.
We could only check in on app a week before hols. I did - there weren't enough seats...
I emails travel agent & was assured the seats I could see online were 'buffer seats' for airline to move things around & not to worry, we'd be checked in at airport.
Well. Airport checkin was a disaster and we had locations all over plane.
Also the 'buffer seats' comment was lie as airplane was full.
Thankfully someone in the row across from me didn't fly so DH moved near me I had our 18 month old on my lap.
Our 7 & 11 year olds were nowhere near us so we had to keep checking they were ok (they were happy out, thank God) but it's BIZZARE to not seat families together when checking in wasn't an option.

Same for the way home, I managed to get us close... not as bad as way out but still not sitting together.

Also there were 19 of us total in party and NONE of us were seated near each other.

I feel your pain OP.
At least you managed flight ok 🙌

Recently had to pay over £100 to ensure our family sat together on a flight. Flying out there was hardly anyone else on the plane so it felt like a huge waste of money. Coming back it was much busier and I was pleased we had planned ahead.

To my knowledge airlines will try and sit you near your children. But near could mean behind, in front of or on separate rows. It's really unfair to expect people to swap. I mean yeah it's the decent thing to do if you're adults or solo travellers but I still think it's on you to ensure you're with such young kids.

Exactly this (though your post won't last long for saying it).

Look, I agree that the booking system should be changed to prevent people from booking without following the instructions, but there is equally an onus on parents travelling with young children to actually read the booking information instead of just making assumptions that it will all be ok. It's very well known that you need to book seats on budget airlines if you care about who you sit with, so I would expect parents to check. And the policy makes it very clear that adults are required to book a seat, so if the OP didn't realise this, then it was on her for not reading the policy properly.

Yes, the airline has a duty of care towards its passengers and needs to keep them safe, but in case you haven't noticed, parents also have responsibility for ensuring that appropriate arrangements are in place for their kids.

This is why I’d never fly Ryan air.

Virgin and jet2, have ALWAYS put us together.

Also totally acceptable. Comes back to this being a systems failure (and not 100% on the parents).