Booking flight seats

[Nannianni]

More and more I’m hearing of passengers bei g asked to move seats , even if paid for seat . My friend booked 3 seats together , asked to move for famiky of 7 , so young children could sit together. Flight attendant said flight could not leave unless children with parents!
speaking to
Others this seems to be happening more and more . Harassed/guilt trip by other passengers and cabin crew.😡😡😡😡

Honestly, people complaining that airlines are trying to make a profit !!!! Do they they really think that a £19 seat should come with position of choice and full luggage allowance? An in-flight snack too? Oh, and naturally should be at noon and not at 6am.

There was a kerfuffle when I was flying back from France last week. It was a 55-minute flight and a group of adults were bleating that they wanted to sit together. One had obviously paid for a good seat up front, and then the others were asking passengers to swap with them so they could sit there too. They had no luck!

Yes. As I say when in the travel agent we went to book seats, not possible. Then at airport I asked how it worked. They said as above.

I didn’t make people move, the airline did. There were other empty seats.

I usually do book seats, it just wasn’t allowed at the late stage.

But what about if it was a full flight? You've tried to profit from a late booking, which is fair enough, but if noone would move would you have got off? Or expected someone else to? Interested in the level of gamble you saw yourselves as taking.

How do you check seat availability before you buy a flight? The only thing you know at that point is whether they have space on the plane, not what seats remain empty.

The only airline I’ve flown with in recent years is Jet2 and you can see what seats are available before you buy the flight. My assumption is that all other airlines allow this.

I don’t know.

I didn’t try to profit from a late booking. We have never had a “summer” holiday due to DH being a tenant farmer. The weather was so dry he couldn’t drill crops. So we went for it, at literally five days notice. I went to a travel agent and it was like a package.

if I had been spoken to by people I would have moved. But I wasn’t.

I was just told I couldn’t check in online, and it would be sorted at airport.

I never even considered it as a gamble. I actually thought, in my head, they must have so many seats kept aside. So was surprised when she explained it to me.

I would have had absolutely no idea I could do that. Nor have I ever seen it with any other airline. I don’t think it’s fair for posters to assign bad motives to someone who has literally done nothing but booked a last minute holiday.

Some of our friends paid for 3 seats (2 adults, a 4 year old and an under 2). When they got to their seats another family had plonked themselves there and refused to move. The seats they were left with were scattered about the plane, including one for the under 2, which my friend tried explaining to the cabin crew that they wouldn’t have needed to book. The cabin crew would not move this other family, even though my friend had the correct boarding passes and the other family refused to show theirs. She felt awful that they were asking people to move, especially as they had pre-booked. They made sure on the return flight that they were one of the first to board but she says there was then 3/4 families trying to be seated together.

Actually every single airline I have booked with in years and years does it - so perhaps the issue is that if you book last minute then you get what is left? And have to suck it up?

@WomanOfSteel - I can see why people are eager to board first if it means they can steal other people’s seats 😬

As a solo traveller, you pay more per person, so why should I be even more put out, when a family ( paying less per person) didn’t book seats together?

This is wrong, very wrong but l get this from the crew point of view. Hard working cabin crew are not paid enough to handle confrontation without support from senior personnel on the ground or in the sky.

l recently returned from Singapore on a work trip, that’s a fairly regular 13.5 hour run for me. The large male in front of me refused to take his seat out of recline mode for meal service making it uncomfortable. The female cabin crew working in our cabin, probably size 10 at a push, did nothing when he refused. And l don’t blame them. I did accidentally stand on his foot when l got off though 😀.

It's not always that people are "too tight" to book seats. Sometimes it is just bad luck.

I went on holiday recently and paid for 3 seats next to each other (2 adults + small child). Unfortunately our first flight was badly delayed and we missed the connecting flight. Then when they rebooked us onto the next flight there were no seats next to each other, so they had to ask other passengers move around.

Luckily the other passengers were kind about it, even though they could have assumed we hadn't booked our seats properly!

It does make you wonder though, there are people on this thread that have been told if they don’t move that the flight won’t be able to take off, yet this family were just able to get away with pinching seats. It was on jet2 as well. We try and board early now just to be sure no one pinches ours. It’s so unfair. I do get that the cabin crew aren’t paid enough for that sort of confrontation but I do think airlines should have something in place to stop this happening if they are going to charge for booking seats.

I also got stuck with a big reclining twat of a man in front of me when I had an 18 month old on my knee. I feel your pain! Luckily it wasn’t an 13.5 hour flight - bloody well felt like it tho.

Forgive me as the airlines I use don’t do it. I just tried booking through BA and no way of seeing seat availability before paying for example. KLM ditto. Obviously some do though which I hadn’t realised.

I still don’t think the comment is fair to be honest. If we’re at the point where a family is seen as CFs for booking a much needed family holiday just because of plane seating then we’re just being pointlessly unpleasant to each other. The poster wasn’t saying they were entitled to boot other passengers out of their seats. They said the circumstances led to an embarrassing situation.

When I went to check in they allocated me seats, with numbers. are these people sitting in different numbers. Or would someone have had the same seat numbers as me?

Thank you. I went to the travel agent because I have not been abroad for twenty years and we wanted to get things correct.

the only time I’ve seen seat issues is here.

I don’t really understand what we could have done. Can we go on holiday, yes. Is there space. Yes.

actually in the way back we had three behind me, one next to me and DH across the aisle. It was fine. The lady next to me was lovely and joked after one very long toilet trip when I took all four that I had forgot to take DH.

The people who pinched the seats refused to show their boarding passes. Surely if they were in their correct seats or there had been a mix up and they’d double booked the seats then they would have been happy to show their passes. I know some flights oversell their occupancy but not usually jet2 on package hols in the school hols I don’t think?

Oh absolutely. I would have shown mine. And we were outwith school holidays. Week before.

This happened to my family on a flight, we were split up to accommodate another family who hadn’t booked correctly. It was very much a case of us being told to move, the family had been put in our seats prior to us boarding and cabin crew told them to stay put and us to move. We didn’t get money back, they make the process for that as longwinded and awkward as possible.

But I didn't say they were CF's, did I? But your much needed holiday doesn't trump my much needed holiday where I booked a seat that was suitable for my disability. To me there is no embarassment - if you are bothered about where you sit then you book early and you pay for your choice - like I do. If you book your much needed holiday at the last minute then you accept that you take what is left. Simples.

Never had a change of aircraft?! I paid for my children to sit with me in a row that turned out to be an emergency exit row after a change of aircraft.

You wouldn’t have had any option but to ask people to swap with them for take off and landing. Are you very inexperienced because you will come across this

I think if ever I was in that position, I'd apologise strongly to the people being asked to move by the crew, tell them that I also booked and paid extra for our seats, but that due to circumstances beyond our control we had not made the booked flight in time.

All the situations I've been in when people are asked to move, there is just some numpty who deliberately hasn't booked a seat and wants to sit next to their 12 year old, no explanation offered.

If I’ve paid a significant amount of money because the airline wants me to do that to be sure of my seat, they then have no moral right to take it off me again.

But how though?? What's the cabin crews explanation for this?? I hear this too often, I'd be f*king furious