Ryanair sits hen party in FIFTEEN separate rows as outrage over seating policy grows

antenna

They could raise all their headline busting prices by £2 or more......then they would not look so exciting.....eg £19.99 would now be £21.99 £27 would be nearer £30........and they may not raise the prices to keep the flash headline price......just a thought..
(that was my point)

Pollycat

Ah.
So you're saying 'yes please' to be able to choose your seats but not pay any more for flights.

Not sure that's in MOL's business model - unless he's being really cute with this and will suddenly announce that people can choose seats for free.
I wouldn't put anything past him.

antenna

Pollycat wrote: »

Ah.
So you're saying 'yes please' to be able to choose your seats but not pay any more for flights.

Not sure that's in MOL's business model - unless he's being really cute with this and will suddenly announce that people can choose seats for free.
I wouldn't put anything past him.

I would never suggest choosing your seat for free.....that's long gone.
and i would NEVER pay greedy boarding or choose my seat in advance.......but cutting to the chase Ryanair are charging more for something your nearly allways got for free....nuff said.

SaveTheEuro

Ryanair's Kenny Jacobs on Watchdog said "how we apply that policy" on random allocation of seats "hasn't changed at all".

Does anyone believe this?

antenna

Kenny Jacobs is a liar and a cheat.even tho he speaks very highly of me.

Pollycat

antenna wrote: »

I would never suggest choosing your seat for free.....that's long gone.
and i would NEVER pay greedy boarding or choose my seat in advance.......but cutting to the chase Ryanair are charging more for something your nearly allways got for free....nuff said.

'got' in the past tense.

Lots of airlines now charge for choosing seats - and have done for some years.

Last time we flew long-haul with Thomas Cook - waaaay back in Feb 2015 there was a charge to choose your seats.

buglawton

Let's not get distracted from the point: Of course airlines have charged for booking specific seats for ages, yada yada.

Which is entirely beside the point. What they haven't charged for in the past is simply keeping a group of people within a single online booking more-or-less together.

paddyrg

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.

I don't believe this figure - is there any reference for the method? I don't trust this statistician wouldn't state their assumptions.

Also, there's no such thing as truly random - how they derive their randomness could have some bearing.

Pollycat

paddyrg wrote: »

I don't believe this figure - is there any reference for the method? I don't trust this statistician wouldn't state their assumptions.

Also, there's no such thing as truly random - how they derive their randomness could have some bearing.

I watched the snippet on iplayer this morning several times.

I think that's the odds she gave but I could be wrong.

You could check it out on iplayer, it starts around 42 minutes in.
The woman was Jennifer Rogers(?), a statistician from Oxford University.
She said that the odds of winning the lottery was 1 in 45 million so the odds of being randomly allocated those seats was 10 times more unlikely so I think the figure I quoted was correct.
I'm not saying the odds are correct, just that that was what the woman said.

The figure I gave in my post is the same as the figure quoted in this later post.

Forever_blowin_bubbles wrote: »

There were three useful observations in the Watchdog piece:

• the 543 million to 1 figure
• the suggestion of the 15th May date for when Ryanair changed its seat allocation algorithm even though they say they made no change
• the acknowledgement that Ryanair's new algorithm is an attempt to offer choice to travellers wishing to book window seats and aisle seats (middle seats are not their customer's choice).

Unless of course that poster has used the figure I gave but I would doubt that very much.

PeacefulWaters

The odds of all 15 people out of a group of 15 being seated in a middle seat on any row is 1 in 3^15. That's just over 14 million to one.

Getting into the more complex realms of statistical probability of all being on different rows in middle seats on a 28 row plane and I can easily believe the 543 million to one number.

I can't be bothered attempting the maths on that.

Ryanair are extracting the urine by claiming nothing has changed. It's at best a unique business model. At worst it exploits their monopoly on some routes where they have no competition for irritated passengers to head off to.