anyone flown recently?

[scissorsorknife]

We are a family of 6 flying ryan air with random allocated seating. Do they insist you sit in the allocated seat or could members of our family swap so it is not the allocated boarding card ie fred sits in johns seat and vice versa. Also if there are empty seats on the flight can you sit in them or are they recording who sits where for covid? Thank you

We just flew on an almost empty Ryanair flight. We had booked seats 6A and B.

Despite the flight being less than 1/4 full, someone was allocated 6C. Madness (from a covid perspective), when there were so many empty seats. His girlfriend was allocated a seat in row 25. Before take off, he asked if he could move, eyeing up the rows and rows of empty seats... the cabin crew had a very long conflab about it and in the end, begrudgingly said he could go and sit nearer, but you'd think he'd have asked if he could sit on the pilot's lap!

As to whether they checked names/seats, definitely not. We sat in each other's seats on both flights.

You can sit in any seat from those allocated to your group. Keep in mind they most likely won’t be together. You might get offered a very random mix of 7C, 16A and 32F etc…

It really depends on the crew as to whether they allow you to move to another area of the plane if there are a lot of empty seats. Some staff are more strict than others. Technically speaking, with Covid they don’t have to allow you to move (for track and trace purposes) and even before Covid some crews wouldn’t permit moving until after take off due to the plane’s weight distribution having already been calculated according to the allocated seating.

I’ve been flying 2-3 times a month over the last year and I’d say in about a third of my flights have they allowed people to move on request.

Recently on a very quiet flight we were asked to stay in our allocated seats for take off & landing but could move and sit elsewhere during the flight

The last 3 flights I haven't booked seating together and we've been together every time
(EasyJet and 2 x jet2 flights)

Thank you very much. Our random seats were rows 30, 15, 9 and 1 - obviously as random as possible presumably with the aim of encouraging us to pay to pre book seats in future!!!

The last flight we took with spaces we had to sit in our allocated seats for take off but then could move.