Beware TUI holidays

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We have booked a holiday in the October half term. In fact we booked the exact same holiday in the same week last year and decided to go back this year.

Booked it all and just paid last instalment due. Thought I'd log in to see when I can reserve seats etc. This is important to us due to various issues with kids and adults. Last year I could do this a good while beforehand and was all fine.

Log in to my account - no booking there. Strange, I eventually found the customer service telephone number, of course it takes a bit of digging around the website to find it.

Apparently (after speaking to two different departments...) the reason it's not on my account is because the fight is a different airline (Thomas cook). And because of this we can't check in until 24 hours before, or select seats. We can "if you want to pay an extra fee".

I know there is a lot of chat about the scandalous way that airlines get you to pay more for this, and had I been made aware of the fact that even though this was included last year (the flight happened to be with TUI) it would be extra this year, I wouldn't have booked it. I budgeted for this holiday, not for additional extras. Especially when I went on exactly the the same holiday last year!!

The person on the phone said "we don't put any information up" about this, but that people are welcome to ring up if they have a question. But why would you have a question if they don't mention it?? Especially if you're booking the SAME holiday, during the SAME WEEK, to the SAME place with the SAME company. Is it me?

We flew with Tui last week and I didn't pay to select seats. We could check in a week before hand so as soon as check in opened I logged in to pick my seats. We weren't able to select which seats we wanted but it seemed to be that we had been allocated them anyway. We are a family of 4, three seats were in a row with the 4th Just across the aisle. Try not to worry.

(It's quite rare to pay for air con! I've never had it on any kind of holiday whether TUI or any other)

When you go through the booking process with TUI it shows you your flights and flight operator. There is clearly a part of the page that says “do you want to book your seats?” With X amount per person. So they are covered, you didn’t look properly when booking unfortunately.

I’ve also had to pay for air con in a few Greek hotels, it’s quite normal. They’ve all been booked through first choice/tui

It isn’t Tui policy to seat under 12’s with parents if you get to the airport early. They’ll always try to as per CAA guidelines and they keep 20% of sears back for airport check in for this reason but it’s not compulsory and if they can’t do it they aren’t obliged to. I’d definitely book seats for a long haul flight, too much risk.

Needmoresleep if you are flying to Mexico you are probably on the Dreamliner and their seats are offset across aisles so your daughter wouldn’t be technically next to you. Like you say they can also be in front or behind, this is why me and my partner payed to sit next to each other. If it was a short haul flight I would have risked it but not on a long haul.

Paying for seats has become such a money maker for all flight operators that I now always check before hand the price and factor it into the holiday budget as it can be a massive add on at the end if you don’t realise.

Did you not pay to sit together last year on a Tui flight, perhaps you were lucky at the online check in stage that there were still seats together? Presumably you knew you were flying with Thomas Cook??

We've booked with Tui for the past few years, we've booked online within 90 days of departure so we've had to pay in full straight away and we've been able to select our seats immediately upon booking (which we have paid for the pleasure - £40 this year for two adults and one child).

With one hotel we were looking at for this year, Easyjet had the better flight times according to the list supplied on Tui website, however it was made very clear that the price only included hand luggage. In fairness to your situation I don't recall any mention about seat allocation, and perhaps this is something Tui should make clearer, but it seemed obvious to me that we would have to deal with Easyjet in that respect rather than Tui since they are different companies.