To expect to be allocated airline seats next to my kids?

[correllia]

My partner and I are off on holiday to menorca at the end of September with Monarch. They have emailed us to tell us we can check in online now, which saves time at the airport.

So far so good - but to complete the process I have to prebook my seats at the cost of £5 per seat per flight. We are on a tight budget and deliberately haven't bought the seats in advance to save the pennies.

Kiddies are 2 and 4, whilst I don't mind our sitting 2 and 2 apart from each other but looking at the seat plan even this option is fast disappearing! Can the airline force such young children to sit next to strangers?

Am I unreasonable to demand that we sit with them?

PS this is my first post, so please be genttle :-)

Perhaps to make it fair they should make it very clear that to meet the requirements of law, all parents will need to pay the extra £5 per person each way, at the time of booking. Then passengers can make a fairer comparison with a national carrier who include seats in the price.

Haven't read whole thread, but if your budget is so tight that you can't afford £20 to book seats maybe you have choosen the wrong holiday!

You do get a refund if you don't end up using a seat you've prebooked - I prebooked a seat in Premium Economy on BA one time and was upgraded to business class. Rather cheekily, I applied for a refund on the charge when we got back and it was processed.

I have been on a number if flights where we have paid to sit together, and on more than one occasion we have been told at checkin (and we check in early) that we can't!!! It does not guarantee you will be together. My parents also experienced this when the 2 of them were travelling.

I would pay an extra £40 to not have to sit next to my (or anyone else's) 2 year old.

I don't think I will be doing this for our flights to the US next year. Both my boys are insanely confident and talkative. If the airline want to give it a try they will be up for sitting somewhere else.

I give it less than an hour before whoever was sitting next to them was on their knees begging for a seat change.

Haven't read whole thread - am sure it's all been said 11 pages in.

My take is YANBU - it's a bloody rip off- just a way for airlines to make more money. If you book a hol, you should all be sat together as a matter of course.

Am currently weighing up whether to book seats for our next hol. We're paying over the odds for an all-inc hol with lots of luxury extras- going to a friend's wedding. The hol company phoned me to see if I want to book seats as they cannot guarantee I'll be sat with DC. I'm a nervous flyer (sick bag anyone?) and it's DC first flight - I pity the fool who sits between us- unless they have a puke fetish!

I will probably book them to save all the hassle but it is a liberty. I find the 'entitlement' argument hilarious- really is the word of the moment round here

Love the Aida link

'they might split up the family but would allocate one adult to each child'
They can and they do! The taxi that was taking us to the airport broke down and we were the last to check in.In those days there were only 5 of us .Me(with baby on knee) at one side of aisle, 2 yr old at other sideof aisle and 4 yo and DS seated separately in different parts of the cabin.
Fortunately sitting next to an unaccompanied 4 yo would fill most people with horror and the passenger next to him swapped with DH.But the cabin crew didn't care!

but if your budget is so tight that you can't afford £20 to book seats maybe you have choosen the wrong holiday!

Rubbish! It is the principle of the thing. For healthy and safety they are obliged to sit you next to your preschool DC. If they want to make more money raise the price of the seats-don't rip you off by stealth.
I refuse to do it.
I would pity anyone who sat between us-do they really want drinks passed across? A story read across them? Or if they are in front, behind-loud conversations.

4 Yo and DH (not DS)

I had to pay £40 per seat per direction (so in total £320) for us to be seated together on overnight flights that already cost nearly £1,500 per seat to see my dying mother ffs

I have flown and been separated from my children so I always pre book the seats now but bitterly resent the cost of it.

That was in economy too

Ooh, just remembered. I posted about flying with Monarch earlier - how their definition of 'together' wasn't the same as anyone's paying for the privilege. It was quite clear that we could have been seated together without splitting up or inconveniencing any other passenger groups / families. However, we were told that seats were allocated on the basis of WHO HAD ORDERED AN IN-FLIGHT MEAL; ie, so they were all seated close to each other to make service easier. It was a four hour flight, so not as if there wasn't plenty of time.

Some posters are saying that it is a legal requirement for airlines to sit children next to their parents. Can anyone provide a link to back this up?

as others said, with kids that young you will get at least 2x2 but it may tak a bit to get it sorted at the check in. we recently flew to menorca with a different airline (charter flight) and had booked (and paid for) an extra seat for DS as he was nearly two. he also had a flight ticket as an infant and it threw them completely but they had a fairly helpful attitude. its a very short flight so so long as you are ok with 2x2 I wouldn't worry.

I don't see that 2x2 is a problem-certainly not worth paying extra to be together. I don't have a link TeamDamon but since they are always keen that you actually watch the safety video and tell you what to do with your DC I really don't think they can have a 4 yr old on their own.
Mine would have just howled at that age-not a prospect anyone would have wanted.
I can't see why anyone wouldn't move out of a seat between you-not after you play I spy etc across them!

Morally... Andrew the airlines are the ones that are saying pay us more money or we won't promise to sit you with your 2 yr old. Morally, that's akin to blackmail.

I suppose one way of dealing with this would be for the booking system to have a filter that automatically assigns seats to each adult/child pairing and then gives you an option to pay the fee if you want to change the seats or put pairs together. So a family of 4 would be automatically allocated 2 pairs of seats which might or might not be together, and could then go into the booking system and pay for a block of 4 if they wished to do so.

That would avoid parents having to pay to meet the CAA requirements, but would also avoid other people who have paid being forced to move.

Andrewofgg - some people do seem to think that keeping pre-booked seats on trains is strictly optional. Pre-DC I used to go up to the north-east several times a year to see family and I always pre-booked well in advance so I could have a forward-facing window seat at a table, ideally in the quiet carriage. I liked to look out of the window and listen to music and I also used to take my laptop and get quite a lot done - and there are plugs on the window-side of most table seats. On more than one occasion I had to turf someone out of my seat in the face of "oh but we need to sit together" arguments. I also frequently got asked to move into non-table, aisle seats to accommodate people who wanted to travel together. Most were terribly indignant when I politely declined and explained why I had pre-booked.

My personal favourites were the recent experience (only weekend away completely on my own since having DS - no way in hell was I giving up even the teeniest bit of enjoyment of my 4 hours of me-time on the train!) when 4 youngish women tried to get me to move as they had brought a picnic and wanted the table to eat it together. When I refused they made a massive point of sitting there anyway, with one of them perched on the arm of the seat, glaring at me. The other memorable experience was when I was about 6 months pregnant and had booked about 3 months in advance on a train that finished up being over-booked. A family of 6 - three adults, one teenager and 2 pre-teens - asked me to move so they could sit together despite there being no free seats. They then cheerfully announced that they would all "squeeze in" and tried to put Granny and teenager in the seat next to me, with the younger child being pushed towards me with a jovial prompt to "squash over a bit there". They were absolutely outraged when I said that there was absolutely no way on this earth that I was going to sit there for over 3 hours with my shoulders practically meeting in front of my face simply because they hadn't booked seats. The child was halfway across the arm-rest by this time and I had to actually say "Get your child off me right now". I finished up having to get a passing guard to tell them to stop it. They time-shared the 3 seats for the rest of the journey and made loud comments about "Time to change. Pity some people are so selfish" whenever they swapped. I entertained myself by typing rude emails about them because the granny was reading over my shoulder!

Morally... Andrew the airlines are the ones that are saying pay us more money or we won't promise to sit you with your 2 yr old. Morally, that's akin to blackmail.

Some airlines use seat prebooking as part of a package of perks for frequent fliers. BA, for example, allows gold and silver executive club members free prebooking, but others have to pay for the privilege. But they do say that if a group cannot sit together, each child will be seated with an adult at least.

Its abit like charging for bags really,its pretty obvious you would take a bag if you are flying abroad.

There is a big difference between an airling being obliged to sit an adult next to a 2yo or to sit an adult next to a 7yo though.

I don't think that you should atutomatically expect that you have the right to six next to a 7yo on a flight where all passengers have been given the option of paying but you have chosen not to. A 2yo, yes, but any older than 5 and I think it's up to you to pay in the same way as if you wanted to sit next to your partner.

Nobody seems to be able to find any clear guidelines as to what age the airlines are advised to make sure children are still sat with parents, and everything that has been linked to is still only guidelines.

The age of the child and whether you should have to pay or not makes all the difference. As much as I would have sympathy for a parent and a 7yo who was upset because they hadn't been seated together, I would be unlikely to give up a seat to acommodate a child of that age. If you know your 7yo is likely to not be ok if s/he doesn't sit near you, then you pay. 7 years old is too old to assume that you should be given seats together because of safety. Most 7 year olds would be able to put a mask on or handle their own meal, so why should they get special treatment that others have to pay for?

When it comes to children of that age, it becomes a preference and not a safety issue, so someone elses need to sit next to a 7yo is no greater than my need to sit next to my husband. Some adults are terrified of flying and some children love it, so I don't think it's fair to say that a child of that age has more right to sit next to their travelling companion than anyone else does.

People are talking about safety issues in case of needing to evacuate the plane, which I think is ridiculous frankly because I can assure you that whether my child was 2 or 12, I would be more concerned about looking for him if we were seated apart than I would be about making sure the passengers around me had as easy an exit as possible.

People are saying that the airlines are being greedy, which I do understand, but at the same time, many passengers probably like having the option to pay to choose where they sit. I know I like it when I'm allowed to go online and choose to be at the middle front of the plane, with a middle and a window seat if it's just me and dh. I would actually be quite annoyed if the airlines took that option away from me just because some parents didn't want to pay to be sat next to their older children. It's just part of the cost of the holiday.

But I will happily let the unfeeling person who won't move sit next to my 3yr old...she has great vocal range, accompanied by a great talent to talk non stop about stuff that I don't care about, let alone a stranger... terrible sit-still ability & a great talent for crying for her mumma! OH & a wonderful art of playing with her food, which means that it goes everywhere.

My 8yr old will probably loudly whinge & sob the whole flight.

The airlines can go fuck themselves if they think I'd let my children sit nr a stranger for almost 24 fucking hours.

Contradictory or what? Either you will or you will not let your screaming child annoy other passengers. Make up your mind.

What a frightening example of the sort of person who may be sitting next to us on our next flight.