Airline just taking the piss now

[juststuckinthemiddlewithyou]

Have flights booked with a well know budget airline. Lets call them RA.

There are 2 of us going and although we would like to sit together , if when we came to check in there were no seats together it isn't the end of the world. Don't worry we won't be asking for anyone to move for us!

However, went to check in today and there is a diagram showing us all the availble seats we can choose from, along with varying prices. or we can go for the free check in. Now i'd say about 75% of the aircraft is available at this point so there was a lovely selection of seats available. But we didn't really want to fork out another £14 (each way) and are not particulary bothered where in the plane we sit so just checked in using the free option.

So RA allocated us 2 seats. 10 rows apart! BOTH seats are in the MIDDLE of a row of 3, with 2 EMPTY seats either side of them.

It just feels like they are taking the piss really. Its no longer a case of if you want to guantee you sit together you should pre-book your seats early. It is now a case of if you don't pay for seats you will definately be seperated.

Now, if there were hardly any seats left at check in and none together I wouldn't think anything of it, but there were LOADS of them and they deliberately sat us miles apart. I've now paid to move one of the seats to an empty one next to the other.

AIBU to think that if you check in and there are seats available together they should be allocated together as opposed to definately not allocated together? In the past we have always been lucky and sat together, so this is obviously a new thing they are doing to now to force people to pay extra for seats even when there are loads of available seats TOGETHER.

you can think of it several ways...

£50 + £20 to pick seats...

or

£70 for your ticket, but you can have a £20 saving if you don't mind our randomly allocating you a seat...

totally your choice!

We've had that too problembottom with Easyjet. We booked the flights less than a week in advance and didn't actually try to check in until the day before because we couldn't decide whether to take a hold bag or manage with hand baggage only.

When we came to check in, we got extra legroom seats next to each other, totally free. the extra legroom was the worst I've had on any flights and I would have been mightily pissed off if I had paid for it.

Is this a very recent thing then?
DH & I flew with RA in April and we never pay extra for seats. We sat together on both the outward and return flights.

God I hate them. They are responsible for the race to the bottom in air travel. I have to fly long haul several times a year because my mum lives in the US. Even BA have given up and are going down the route of asking for extra money for a normal, civilised flight.

Your OP really made me laugh.

I don't want to fly with RA again. And I normally put up with any old shite service.

We booked kid friendly flight times. They then amended them so they were really late at night. And then the fuckers were delayed by an hour and a half.

Thing was - my friend went a week later - same airports - and the EXACT same thing happened.

🐟

Theyre just randomly allocating across the cheapest available seats, arent they? The middle seats are the least popular, so theyre going to try and fill those first.

Flew RA yesterday... all four of us in middle seats all in different rows.
Very many people annoyed but just quietly grinned and beared it for three hours... Not a scientific poll but I'd say around 60% refused to pay the extra fees yesterday [and on our flight the week previously]

We encountered the exact same problem doing RA online booking for group of 5 people a few weeks ago. All middle seats, all different parts of the plane.

Didn't matter for us, since it was a group of adults. If I was traveling with kids I would make a huge effort to avoid them. When traveling solo they are my least preferred option...and am happy to pay a bit more to support companies with a better service ethic

Does anyone know what happens if people travelling together actually check-in individually, say two or three minutes apart. Do they still get put millions of rows apart, or does the randomnes get a bit less?

You get what you pay for

This is so true. People expect cheap flights so the airlines find other ways to get their money.

Flights in Europe are ridiculously cheap compared to, say, flying internally in Canada. And unfortunately this is the fallout

I get really cross that we pay so much more, then I see this kind of bullshit and think maybe it's not so bad

If there was noone sitting next to you, couldnt the other person just move anyway

Are you sure it's £14 each way?

I booked flights with this airline and had a similar problem when i went to check us in. We're a family of 4 and we were all given middle seats ranging from row 11 to row 29!

I coughed and paid to sit together. It cost £20 each way for all four seats but i know the kids will want to lean on me and sleep as we have early flights.

I find it's rare to be next to an empty seat so I wouldn't bank on that.

Seat choice fees with Ryanair are distance dependant and seasonal.

UK-Dublin in November and it's only a couple of quid each way, but I think it can be as much as £20 per person per flight UK-Canaries in the summer, which adds up to a fair whack, although they now give some for free when making you pay when travelling with children. But it still might be £80 for a family of 4, so not pocket change.

I know what you're saying about cheap flights, but this was part of a package deal and the airline happened to be RA. But we still had to do our own check in.

Its obviously on purpose, and I don't get why they allocate all middle seats first. That pretty much guarantees NO ONE will end up sitting together.

Also, the seats they allocated were available for purchase if we'd wanted to before hand, and I was able to then purchase the one next to the free one.
whathaveifound the cheapest option was £7 per seat, but they ranged upto £12 per seat. I have flown in the past where there were £5 seats, but not on this flight!

@theymademejoin "You're better off checking in at the last minute now as they reserve aisle and window seats for people willing to pay. They are only released into the "random allocation" pool closer to the flight time."

Exactly this. If they're filling middle seats first, where is your motivation to check in early? Might as well do it at the airport - doing it online never seems to save any time anyway.

I'm getting a bit twitchy. We are flying long haul BA this summer and didn't pay to have seats together because they state a policy of not splitting children from parents. But it does make me nervous that they might pull a similar stunt.

People who don't want to pay extra for a seat will be given the perceived worst seats: middle seats. Nobody wants those, So that's what you will be assigned. Separately.

I so prefer the old days where people travelling together were given seats together whenever possible and you didn't have to pay extra for seats ... because you need a seat to fly!

It's not taking the piss, it's business. They want your money, they're not in business to be nice!

If you aren't nice to your customers you cannot expect them to keep coming back to you. The only reason RA survive is that on many of their routes there is no other low cost alternative. If they faced a competitor who offered similar prices but treated customers better they would be out of business very quickly.

The other unattractive thing about Ryanair is their flight times. In my experience they are more likely to fly very early in the morning, meaning having to get up at 2/3am or arriving back in the early hours (mainly north of England to Europe where each airline does one out and back flight each day).

I've discounted them in favour of more expensive flights on jet2 that run at more civilised hours more than once.

If my choice is a 6 am flight from Manchester for £90 or a 10 am flight from Leeds for £110, I'd take the latter just about every time.

I know what you're saying about cheap flights, but this was part of a package deal and the airline happened to be RA. But we still had to do our own check in

I was wondering whether it's different if you book via a travel agent or tour operator. I would have thought that you would have been grouped together then, but it seems not.

DS is flying with a sports group tomorrow, I wonder how their seats will be dealt with.

Ryanair is great. It is cheap, it goes to lots and lots of destinations, it is safe, it is on time.

But obviously paying 2quid for a seat is eating up the internet. I say foul, pay it or shut up.

Sorry for being so blunt, but ain't that the truth.

A friend has just come back from Italy, lots of people seated separately on flight. Everyone got up and politely asked others if they'd like to swap seats, so everyone got to sit with who they wanted anyhow.

I agree completely and had the same thing when checking in today with same airline. I appreciate that the middle seats are less desirable and that people are more wiling to pay for aisle/ window seats but putting couples in middle seats rows apart is ridiculous. My DH and I ate only 4 rows apart and with a short flight it's no big deal but middle seats were available in front of each other!! Just another way of getting more money. If they want to save money maybe they should stop letting people board with huge massive heavy bags that take up the whole overhead locker and charge them for checking in the hold like they should do! I see this more and more especially on long haul when buisness travellers squash other travellers bags by ramming their suit carrier/ heavy suitcases in.

Same thing when I see cabin crew (well known British Carrier) moving people's stuff so these heavy oversized bags can fit. Always pisses me off when they do that.

This is new thing. It's been like that for the last month, maybe two? Plenty of articles about I think a stag party of ~14 and they were all scattered in the middle seats.

Ryanair denying anything has changed but it was never like that before. As long as seats were available, if you were checking in two or more people at the same time it would automatically give you consecutive seats. Now it's random middle seats. Thank god I read about it here and wasn't caught by surprise when I was booking flights for my parents.

Just flew BA to Italy -- you can either pay to select your seats when you book, or check in online 24 hours before the flight and select your seats for free then. (They do provisionally allocate seats at that point but you can change them if other seats are available.)
It might be a gamble if the flight is very full but whenever I've checked in at the 24 hour point the provisional seat allocation for DH and I has always been together and if I haven't liked those particular seats I've simply chosen two others. No charge. Never been separated.

Flights to southern Italy last month (booked about four months in advance) cost about £120 quid each return, including generous hold baggage allowance (23 kg each) plus two pieces each of hand luggage. I think BA still try and put passengers clearly travelling in the same party next to each other. How long that will last is another matter.