Fury as Ryanair seats passengers 'rows apart' unless they pay to sit together

pelirocco

We have used Ryannair twice this year and I have been pretty impressed ( except for the flying out of stanstead , nothing wrong with airport just a pain to get to sometimes ) We took carryone for both trips and they neve even gave it a 2nd glance . The return trip on the last journey did have a delay due to a technical issue , but we each received euro400 ( or was it 6oo cant remember ) just for sitting in an airport for a few hours , no great hardship. I would fly with them again . BA has always been my airline of choice and have noticed its getting more and more budjet airline , which as long as the price reflects it , Its fine . We are flying BA Friday , so it will be interesting to compare

leylandsunaddict

ericthelobster wrote: »

I've just booked flights for 4, for a month's time. Outgoing with Jet2.com, inbound with Easyjet. As I was just into the 30-day online check-in window, I checked in for both flights. Both offered me seat selection for a fee, and as usual, I declined.

With Easyjet, we've ended up with 4 seats in a row - fine. With Jet2, however, despite the fact that the vast majority of the seating plan was still 'green', ie up for grabs, we ended up with 4 seats with none any closer than 5 rows apart. No way is that even random; it's perfectly obvious looking at the seating plan that it's deliberate, and designed to make us cough up £13 a head extra to sit together. I'm not paying up; we're 4 adults and it's not a big deal, I just resent the cynicism of the airline.

and yesterday I read 2 posts from people who hadn't paid to select seats on Jet2 and got seated together.

buglawton

alwaystravelling wrote: »

I recently flew with 3 others on a Ryanair flight to Nuremberg. All of us were scattered around the aircraft, outbound and inbound, as were members of every other group I spoke to. This policy will not be changed by complaining to Ryanair. They have little regard for negative customer feedback.

The company makes it clear that it allocates seats randomly, unless you pay to sit together. However, if it can be demonstrated that the allocation of seats to passengers who check in on the same booking (groups), is in fact NOT random, but is done in a way which would inevitably result in those groups being broken up, then it could be that Ryanair is in breach of Trade Description legislation. It would not matter whether the company allocated middle seats first, window seats first, or even seats by row number. The point is that the allocation would not be random, as stated by Ryanair. The 1968 act makes it an offence for a trader to make false or misleading statements about goods or services. Perhaps complaints in this direction might be worth pursuing, to force Ryanair into a full and honest statement of their seat allocation policy.
In the mean time, this policy, and the way the company views its customers in general, demonstrates yet again why Ryanair should be called a cheap airline, and by "cheap", I do not mean low cost.

I do believe that in this episode of You&Yours on Radio 4, they got a mathematician to prove that Ryanair's 'random' seat allocation system was now not random, but actually non-random with a very high probability:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08rp339
(about 7 mins in)
In the same program Easyjet is praised for seating people together from a single booking.

ericthelobster

leylandsunaddict wrote: »

and yesterday I read 2 posts from people who hadn't paid to select seats on Jet2 and got seated together.

Where, out of interest?

buglawton

The algorithm Ryanair must be using to unrandomly separate people in a single booking reminds me of the VW emissions cheatware.

Elsewhere on one of these 2 Ryanair seating threads (longest running unmerged threads - mods where were you?) I saw the quote from Ryanair's site saying they'll seat you randomly. That must be a trades description issue.

scd3scd4

Anyone see them on Watchdog last night?

Pollycat

I saw the interview with the pretty ineffectual Steph McGovern and Ryanair's head of Marketing (Kenny Jacobs).

He said there was no splitting up of passengers.
Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

A statistician said the odds of 4 researchers on the same booking on 2 return flights being split up were odds of 1 in 543 million.

"Ooooh, that's massive, isn't it", said the insightful Ms McGovern. :rotfl:

scd3scd4

Pollycat wrote: »

I saw the interview with the pretty ineffectual Steph McGovern and Ryanair's head of Marketing (Kenny Jacobs).

He said there was no splitting up of passengers.
Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

A statistician said the odds of 4 researchers on the same booking on 2 return flights being split up were odds of 1 in 543 million.

"Ooooh, that's massive, isn't it", said the insightful Ms McGovern. :rotfl:

I don't believe him ........I think I will take the research and history of Watchdog over Kenny boy and RA. As they said...........why not just be honest and admit the practice. They would get more respect.........not a lot, but a little..


I firmly believe RA and Kenny were caught with their figurative pants down.


Ohh and I am off to get a couple of scratch cards.

huwy123

Checked in to a flight today and me & my partner were separated despite there being 2 free seats next to both of us...