that airlines charge you extra to sit together!?!?

[Dollygirl2008]

I mean, after a totally shitty year, I have scraped the money together to take my DC away for a weeks holiday to Menorca- possible the last foreign holiday we will have for a long time. And now, the sodding, well reputable tour operator want more money for us to sit together!?!? I mean, do pepper early do this!? Are they really going to split us up (DC is 7)??

Interested in others views or experience, thanks

And sitting together isn't next to the person. It includes directly in front or behind or across the aisle. So a family of 4 paying to sit together may get 4 aisle seats at a cost of £100

That's only if you dont pay for it. If you pay you get access to the seating plan at least a 90 days before the flight and choose your seats then. On some airlines you get immediate access (we have already chosen our seats for our flight at the end of July - 4DEF on the way out and 7DEF on the way back ).

I am not surprised they didn't. If I travel alone, I don't care where I sit and would swap. But that would rarely be of any use, as it is only one seat. Often those you could swap with, are those who will have a reason to want to sit together.

Problem is with a low cost airline it is cheaper for them if people don't sit together, it incentivises people to get there early enough to join the mad scramble to get on the plane and get seats which means they hit their target take off times etc.

You pay for a seat on a plane, but it doesn't guarantee you a particular seat with your family.

If you are going in school holiday time then the flight is likely to be full of families, very often a family of four will have 2 seats in one row and 2 seats in another, which leaves odd seats on the end of an aisle dotted round the plane for the late-comers.

If you plan to get there early enough and join the scrum you should be ok, but it only takes one last minute "I need a wee" in the airport or slight traffic hold up on the way to the airport and you are last on the plane and you have to take what is left.

Throwing a strop when you get on won't help if everyone else wants to be seated with their kids too and they have got there early / paid extra to do so.

It's as low as £2.99 on easyjet, the price of a sandwhich or a coffee. One of you can book to be next to your DCs and the other can take pot luck if you want to save your money.

Youarent I'm probably one of those couples you talk about. When my DCs were younger this paying for seats didn't apply, I'll give you that. But we had our own pressures too.

Nope. I don't get the 'families on a budget' schtick that always gets bandied about on these threads.

If you are on a tight budget and cannot afford the extra 30/40/50 quid for allocated seating then you shouldn't be holidaying abroad. If your budget is that tight that it means a holiday or nothing what on earth are you going to do if one of your party falls ill on holiday? Or has an accident? Or you lose your passport/room key/hotel beach towel? All those things will cost you more than 30/40/50 quid and you will HAVE to pay.

If you are flying in an emergency/to see family/to escape then I get it. But if the flight is for a 'jolly' then there are 10000s of holidays out there where that final 30/40/50 quid will NOT be an issue.

DH, DS2 and I arrived at the departure gate clutching our boarding cards for our seats which were sprinkled throughout the plane. The ground crew went to some lengths, including talking to the plane, to move us so we could sit together. DS2 was 18. .

We explained that we had no objection to being seated separately, it being a short flight and us all being adults, to no avail. Nope, we were a family and the airline thinks it's nicer for families to sit together. Thing was, we ended up in a row which meant that one of us had to have the middle seat. The computer allocated seats were two aisles and a window - far better .

Blimey carabos. That certainly wasn't a budget airline surely?! If they did that with everyone, the plane would never take off !

It is a discount for the airline not having to do a jigsaw to seat you in groups.

Much easier to fill the plane - and therefore cheaper - if you don't have to accommodate groups - no odd ones and twos in the middle of a row.

If it is cheaper they can offer lower fares. Book with an airline that does not charge for this - it will probably be more expensive overall.

If families get split up when they could have booked their seats, it is entirely the fault of the parents. It is unfair blaming other passengers when it your tightness that caused the problem.
I would only travel on airlines where you can pre book because even as an adult ds will never be able to sit alone.

Imagining a flight which is mostly full of families and every seat is booked, it is unlikely that the perfect tetris-game solution exists where every family gets to sit together, so it is quite right and proper to have a two-tier price so that those who pay more get their preferred seating options.

Much applause for FishWithABicycle.

Perhaps some posters here would prefer it if all seats were £15 more, and a discount was offered to people who ticked a box saying "I don't care where I sit, slot me in to fill it up".

If you want to haute tee you will all be sat together you have to pay. If not you take your chances.

You can try and make sure you check in online as soon as it opens but that won't help you if many people have already paid.

When not traveling with the children I don't pay as I don't care where I sit or if I am with the people I am travelling with. By not caring I get a cheaper option which is great.

When with children I pay to make sure I do.

People who have paid for a specific seat to either sit with someone or sit in a particular place due to preference or need won't want to move and give up what they paid for just because you didn't.

We booked with first choice for our honeymoon last year, I refuse to pay for seats as I think it's grabby- it's obvious that a party booking together would want to sit together and not placing them together to get extra money is grabby- if you want to sit in a specfic seat, fair enough, pay, but airlines should seat people on the same booking together, they used to be able to do it!

It would have been £60 per person, per flight (so £240) to book seats for our honeymoon so I didn't.

Legally they have to seat a child with in 4 seats of their parent but this can be forward, back or side.

Companies who do this are utter wankers.

Surely it makes sense to automatically seat every party who book together, together!

You have paid for your seat already, why the fuck they think it's ok to charge extra just to be seated together, especially where infants are concerned, is beyond me.

Having the option to pay extra to pick extra legroom/end of aisle/near the exit seats is ok, but being forced to pay just to ensure you're sat with your kids or whoever is wrong.

Companies who do this are utter wankers.

Surely it makes sense to automatically seat every party who book together, together!

You have paid for your seat already, why the fuck they think it's ok to charge extra just to be seated together, especially where infants are concerned, is beyond me.

Having the option to pay extra to pick extra legroom/end of aisle/near the exit seats is ok, but being forced to pay just to ensure you're sat with your kids or whoever is wrong.

Surely it makes sense to automatically seat every party who book together, together!

Nope. It does not "make sense" at all. Fitting in all groups, plus any special requests, is a very tricky problem that may leave you with a lot of individual seats that nobody wants.

You may want to scroll up and look for FishWithABicycle's post for a fuller explanation.

I mean, you're not paying for the cost of booking a seat, which is a job that takes a nanosecond to complete on a computer. What they are doing is having a headline price and then adding to it as though it were an optional extra but actually you only find out the full price after you've booked. It's a fucking con, and not liking it doesn't make you entitled or whiny or whatever, it just means that actually when you're buying something you would like to know how much it costs before you pay, not after

This, totally. It's all a fucking con.

I almost never pay for seats and DP and I often get seated separately. The airlines do it deliberately to try and force people to pay.

In understand why people don't pay because they don't like being taken advantage of. One poster mentioned it was £8 in total for her family of 4 to sit together - I've never seen it as low as £2 pp per flight, it is usually much more than that and I totally understand the OP not wanting to pay.

Because I don't agree with how airlines do this but do benefit from lower prices because they do, I would swap if it helped a family sit together.

I don't care where I sit, I only travel on budget airlines (BA etc don't do any routes useful to me) and all the seats except the ££££s extra legroom ones, are much of a muchness anyway.

It was Jet2 roussette.

I have never experienced a flight where young children are separated from both their parents. Maybe if there are two kids, two parents they may get split, but the children are always with one parent or the other. As its only a short flight, it's probably not worth the extra money for allocated seats!

legally they have to sit a child within 4 rows of a parent

No they don't.

CAA guidelines (note not rules):

Families, children and infants

The seating of children close by their parents or guardians should be the aim of airline seat allocation procedures for family groups and large parties of children

Young children and infants who are accompanied by adults, should ideally be seated in the same seat row as the adult. Children and accompanying adults should not be separated by more than one aisle. Where this is not possible, children should be separated by no more than one seat row from accompanying adults. This is because the speed of an emergency evacuation may be affected by adults trying to reach their children

Whenever a number of infants and children are travelling together the airline should make every effort to ensure that they can be readily supervised by the responsible accompanying adults

Note should ideally be not 'must'

I have been on a flight where young children are separated from both parents. And it was because the parents were flying in Business Class.

I've had good experience like that with Jet2 too carabos. As in my previous post, I almost never pay for seats. The only exception is with Ryanair, where you can't check in your return flight if it is a week away or more without paying.

To me, £12 is a small price to pay to avoid having to fiddle about checking in on holiday, finding somewhere to print, or wifi to do it on your phone and then not break your phone or have flat battery on the way back. I like to switch off from admin stuff and internet on holiday and just want to get it all sorted before I go. I don't like paying it but that's my choice.

Anyway, Jet2 - when checking in online they often seat me and DP separately, but more than once when we got to the airport, they offered to change for free at the bag drop, so we were together. I don't mind either way. We are grown ups who can exist separately for a couple of hours. I usually sleep or read and DP usually watches films or falls asleep and snores anyway.

The planes are usually full or very nearly full, but they somehow must have been able to do this without upsetting anyone else?

Another time, they offered us the extra legroom seats for £15 for the pair of us, which I'm sure was a lot less than when checking in online so we took them, this was well worth it as we were going to one of the Canary islands, so a 4.5 hour flight.

Jet2 are usually a little more expensive than Ryanair, but you do get more luggage allowance and the flights are often at more civilised times.

I have a fear of flying and always book Seats together for me and dp. I just take it as a cost to be covered. If someone asked me to swap they would have to pay me the price for both seats as they were both chosen to have us sit together.

As for someone expecting me to look after their kid they would get told 'sorry not my circus, not my monkey' any requests from the child and I would tell her to go and speak to her mum/dad. Headphones in, kindle open and ignore.

at parents flying business class and DCs in normal. Either you all have business class, or if you don't want to pay, or if it's not allowed? you all go in the normal seats?

DH and I flew in January. We don't pay for seats on short-haul but as it happened we were seated together. We were kind of in the midst of a large family group who had selected their seats, but it seemed hadn't understood the plan, so they were a group of 10 or so who had a couple of people in some rows and three in others plus a random one elsewhere in the plane.

They kept on and on at us to move so they could sit together, they claimed we were in their seats and they repeatedly called the cabin crew to try to get them to move people. They couldn't understand which seat was aisle and which was window and were generally a pain in the neck for the whole flight. One of the women was genuinely upset and cried.

I get that people want to sit with small children, but I don't understand why it's generally such a "thing" that people need to sit together on a short flight. I would say that whether flying alone as I do for work, or with DH, pretty much every flight someone will ask me to move, either for their convenience or what they imagine is mine.

I don't get how they are allowed to seperate small children from parents. In an emergency the rely on everyone rushing in the same direction to get as many people off the plane as possible. Planes are designed with this in mind. So if there are half a dozen parents heading in the opposite direction that holds up everyone. (Disabled and children aren't given any priority in this rush to exit as it is about numbers and getting the most people off - sorry to say it but one slow person would be 'sacrificed' in favour of ten healthy ones).