Sunshine & Ryanair - Seat Allocation

luckwudaveit

I am travelling with my wife and 4 year old on a package holiday bought with Sunshine and flying with Ryanair. We have not (yet) paid for seat allocation. I'm guessing Ryanair will allocate two seats together and another separate. We would like 3 altogether and I'm looking for the cheapest way to guarantee this please.

I've gone in to Sunshine and we can pay £12pp to request a seating preference.

My understanding was that a child would be automatically placed next to an adult, so do I need to pay Sunshine 2 or 3 lots of £12? Or should I just wait til we check in with Ryanair and then pay for seat allocation (if it will let us)?

Any help appreciated.

bagand96

Do you have your Ryanair booking details? You might be able to log in and do it yourself?

luckwudaveit

No. We're not flying til late May, but the weekly email has spurred me on to start looking in to this.

814man

OK I'm going to give a probably unpopular and not very money saving view here. This is a discussion we see a lot on this forum. Many criticise the airlines and others will no doubt say dont pay just turn up and try to force your way to sit together by quoting some law or human right, and others will say just rely on the good nature of your fellow travelers to exchange seats.
My view would be that its clearly an important aspect of the holiday for you as a family to travel together. I understand this having gone on holidays with children before, in fact for them the flight can be a memorable and fun highlight of the whole holiday. So why not just factor into the overall price of your holiday the cost of seating together and dont either let the whole process of trying to avoid it, or even worse the potential that you may be separate, spoil the whole thing. I suspect that in the overall cost the price of allocated seating will be a pretty small price to pay.

luckwudaveit

814man wrote: »

OK I'm going to give a probably unpopular and not very money saving view here. This is a discussion we see a lot on this forum. Many criticise the airlines and others will no doubt say dont pay just turn up and try to force your way to sit together by quoting some law or human right, and others will say just rely on the good nature of your fellow travelers to exchange seats.
My view would be that its clearly an important aspect of the holiday for you as a family to travel together. I understand this having gone on holidays with children before, in fact for them the flight can be a memorable and fun highlight of the whole holiday. So why not just factor into the overall price of your holiday the cost of seating together and dont either let the whole process of trying to avoid it, or even worse the potential that you may be separate, spoil the whole thing. I suspect that in the overall cost the price of allocated seating will be a pretty small price to pay.

Yes, you're right and I am prepared to pay for allocated seating. Sunshine will charge £36 for this which is minimal as you say. But Ryanair's terms are £4 per seat, which totals £24. Clearly I'd like to pay the lower fee and I'm just wondering how to go about this.

PeacefulWaters

£4 per family where U12s are involved.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/useful-info/help-centre/faq-overview/Travelling-with-children/Will-families-be-split-up-if-they-do-not-wish-to-pay-for-allocated-seating

luckwudaveit

PeacefulWaters wrote: »

£4 per family where U12s are involved.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/useful-info/help-centre/faq-overview/Travelling-with-children/Will-families-be-split-up-if-they-do-not-wish-to-pay-for-allocated-seating

Thanks. So I'm guessing I need to wait until 4 days before to get those prices direct from Ryanair?

I suppose this is my point, it's not clear when booking through an agent, what you are entitled to.

PeacefulWaters

Luckwudaveit wrote: »

Thanks. So I'm guessing I need to wait until 4 days before to get those prices direct from Ryanair?

I suppose this is my point, it's not clear when booking through an agent, what you are entitled to.

I don't think Ryanair care for agent bookings.

Pollycat

PeacefulWaters wrote: »

I don't think Ryanair care for agent bookings.

Indeed they don't.
In fact, they go so far as to say:

Price comparison websites


At Ryanair we are very proud of our lowest fare guarantee and in order to ensure that more and more people realise that they won’t find better value elsewhere, Ryanair has agreed to permit third party websites to gain authorised access to www.ryanair.com for price comparison purposes.
Ryanair will licence access to its price, flight and timetable information for use in comparing Ryanair's prices with those of other airlines.
However in the interests of our passengers, Ryanair will continue to prohibit, as it always has, the re-selling of its flights.This is because the cheapest fares can only be found directly on Ryanair's websites.
The Licence is conditional on each price comparison site signing the Licence Agreement - click here for details. Any price comparison website wishing to avail of this offer should return a signed copy of the Agreement to:

companies shouldn't be booking flights on behalf of other people. :eek:

They must be booking the flights pretending to be the passenger themselves.

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/useful-info/help-centre/faq-overview/Making-a-reservation#0-8

Heedtheadvice

....and I would add another note of caution.

Clearly, I agree getting seats together is very desirable if not essential for a family with a child. Airlines, imho, should not be allowed to split up a family where there is a need to sit together....without the passenger's agreement.

I came to this conclusion after flying a fair while ago with Ryanair. A family had been booked to sit together by their insurance company (or it's agent) following an incident on holiday. Clearly given the condition of one of the family members (an adult in this case) support was needed throughout the flight owing to a disability. The seats allocated for disabled people had been booked but Ryanair wanted to split up the family to allow able bodied adults to sit in those seats leaving the disabled person sitting alone.

After much protracted discussion whilst the aircraft was sitting on the tarmac the senior cabin attendant was heard to say 'you may have booked a seat but that means nothing. Sit up there!) -well away from the family member.

We were disgusted, it took 20 minutes to sort out. Ryanair's attitude (and a few of the passengers) was disgusting. We have not flown with them again (and if we had the choice would not fly with the very unsympathetic passengers too!) that was the final straw!

Book by all means but be aware you might, nevertheless, just have to argue to sit together. It ought to be automatic!

Many passengers are quite happy with their flights.....but RA do tend to live down to their reputation!

maman

Luckwudaveit wrote: »

Thanks. So I'm guessing I need to wait until 4 days before to get those prices direct from Ryanair?

I suppose this is my point, it's not clear when booking through an agent, what you are entitled to.

I agree.


I've recently returned from my third city break booked through Broadway Travel. They book flights, hotels and train travel for us. To keep costs down their preferred airline is Ryanair but this time we decided to pay more to fly from Gatwick.


We flew out with British Airways and back with Easyjet.


The agents offered to book seats for us (for a price) but I said I'd do it myself. I always do it for DH and I as we like aisle seats close to the front block.


Booking seats with British Airways was easy although IMO very expensive.


With Easyjet, the booking agents seemed to have done something to prevent us booking early. I suspect this was because they wanted us to book through them and charge us more. The system had definitely changed since I used them previously. I could look at my booking, enter travel documents etc. but not book seats. I had to wait until less than a month before travelling before I could book my seats. The agents told me it was because of Easyjet but I know that's not true. I travel frequently with Easyjet and have already booked seats, last autumn, for flights coming up in July.


I suspect the same type of thing is happening with OP.