To believe that ‘next to you’ means next to me and not behind or in front of me?

[AreYouAGod]

Booked first holiday abroad in years. TUI in their ‘upgrades’ emails told me to pre book seats. £30 per person to do this each way. So £240 to pick seats which is just mind blowing.

Spoke to an advisor and they said that I only needed to pre book the seats for me and my husband as the kids were young, so would automatically be ‘sat next to us’. I queried this multiple times.

Two weeks out from departure and I check and, predictably, we are not seated together.

Call TUI this morning and the advisor says ‘next to you’ can mean behind, in front or across the aisle.

This cannot be true. So I query the sense in this and she cuts me off.

Call back again. (This is an hour of my life on hold, going through security, talking to a robot about my ‘problem’, all with a rising sense of dread that I’m going to be in a viral TikTok or complained about in an AIBU thread for begging other passengers to move seats.)

Get through again to be told the kids could and probably would be seated anywhere. And if I don’t pay up it’s unlikely we will be put together.

So I just had to fork out £80 to change the seats and pre book the kids seats.

AIBU to think that ‘next to us’ means the seat next to me?

Surely seating 7 and 8 year old children from their family is a safety risk on a flight? Not to mention really annoying for other passengers?

Feel free to tell me I’m just being tight but I can’t understand why I’m paying for seat allocation on top of the flight costs. Plus, I have been told three different things by three different TUI advisors.

No wonder there are so many seat flight dramas - no one knows what’s going on!

Airline booking systems do it automatically. It isn’t done by a human on any airlines, even the ones that seat you together. A lot of airlines automatically put people together and they certainly don’t have a multitude of employees waiting for people’s bookings to come in. Obviously if you are a large group or you book late you might not all be together.

Depend on the route, BA charge some pretty hefty sums for booking seats.

It hasn’t always been the case on planes at all. Years ago you would not have been allowed to purposely seat your child away from you (ie as their parents). And you would not have been allowed to fly on planes with multiple young children. It had to be one per parent, you were also not allowed to ask another random adult to be responsible for them in the event of an emergency. This was all because of safety and were strict rules.

It’s only recently, they are have changed this, since they’ve started charging people to book seats. And it’s very obviously a way of making sure parents pay this extra charge so they don’t worry about their children being basically unattended on a flight. It’s so obviously a cash grab at the expense of safety (and the comfort of other passengers who may end up having to to look after a random child) that I’m very surprised that people seem to be just accepting of it. Maybe it’s people too young to remember what the rules used to be when you didn’t have to pay to be seated.

When exactly was that a rule? My brother and I were separated from our parents on a flight 30 years ago!

When I was 7/8 I'd have been a bit shy, but perfectly well behaved sat next to a random on the plane. They should be fine.