OK Ryanair, I’ll pay your blood money

jpsartre

esuhl wrote: »

Why don't people just sit where they like,

Because others may have paid to be in the seat they decide to occupy? I'm sure seat swapping happens regularly on Ryanair flights.

VfM4meplse

peachyprice wrote: »

Or you could do what many of us do and not fly Ryan Air.

Is Sleazyjet that much better? I wish Southend Airport had decent airlines, ie ones that actually give a stuff about their customers. Until then I'll keep making the trek to LHR (being stuck on the M25 / A406 is all part of the fun).

scaredofdebt

We had this with Thomas Cook, flying out my daughter was alone on row 1, two other children on row 2 and the other 3 in our party in row 32. We hadn't realised you could pre-book seats (was a package with another operator) but coming back had a word at check in and was given 6 seats on the same row at no extra cost.

Now, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to have reserved seating but I was talking to another holidaymaker in the resort who had paid £20 per seat each way, that would be £240 extra for our family of 6 to reserve seats both ways.

Civil Aviation Authority guidelines

"Families, children and infants
The seating of children close by their parents or guardians should be the aim of airline seat allocation procedures for family groups and large parties of children.

Young children and infants who are accompanied by adults should ideally be seated in the same seat row as the adult. Where this is not possible, children should be separated by no more than one seat row from accompanying adults. This is because the speed of an emergency evacuation may be affected by adults trying to reach their children.

Whenever a number of infants and children are travelling together the airline should make every effort to ensure that they can be readily supervised by the responsible accompanying adults."

https://www.caa.co.uk/passengers/on-board/seating-allocation/

Note the use of the word "should".

I suspect this would be adhered to more closely if someone sued the airline after an accident that led to unnecessary injuries/deaths due to children/parents clogging up the aisles after being sat apart.

benjus

richardw wrote: »

Simple answer is the Government legislates to avoid this, everyone is safer and Ryanair enormous profits fall slightly. A win for passengers.

Well yes, except that it would be ticket prices rising rather than Ryanair profits falling, if past experience is anything to go by.

BarryBlue

richardw wrote: »

I will not. I do not fly Ryanair anymore.

I agree and have said it many times. Ryanair is a serious accident waiting to happen, it will be on the ground with evacuation being too slow because of too many bags in the cabin and people looking for their friends and family. The UK CAA and government is like a chocolate teapot, absolutely useless.

I used to enjoy trips to places I had never heard of and the run from the plane on a Sunday night to catch the last Stansted Express train.

Just put the fares up or just park the planes, but be safe at the end of the day.

We used to fly to all sorts of obscure places with Ryanair, especially when they had their silly prices of £5, £1, €1 and even 1p. I had an Electron card just to pay Ryanair and we could go for the weekend on cabin bags quite easily. Sadly those days are gone.

I actually wouldn't be bothered about the seating policy. If I don't sit next to the wife for a couple of hours - so what! However, we don't now fly Ryanair for a couple of reasons. One is this frequent cancellation of flights for so-called operational reasons. We've decided to use someone we can rely on.

However, we have another reason too. My daughter works in aviation and her company used to deal with Ryanair, but now they refuse to do so because of their compromising on safety. She informs me that lots of people in the industry won't fly with them either and avoid booking with them for business travel. I don't pretend to understand all the detail but I'm following her advice.

steve1500

benjus wrote: »

Well yes, except that it would be ticket prices rising rather than Ryanair profits falling, if past experience is anything to go by.

Ryanair can put up their fares as much as they want I still won't flying with them.


Customer Service has a value

JimmyTheWig

benjus wrote: »

Well yes, except that it would be ticket prices rising rather than Ryanair profits falling, if past experience is anything to go by.

But they'd only have to put the prices up to an average of what people are paying anyway. The net benefit being that you could tell the cost of the flight from the start and compare better.

jpsartre

JimmyTheWig wrote: »

But they'd only have to put the prices up to an average of what people are paying anyway.

The problem is that people don't think about that. A large percentage of the people that book flights will go with whomever is at the top of the list when prices are sorted from low to high. That's why LCC's like Ryanair have been trendsetters in the industry when it comes to the introduction of paying for onboard refreshments, seat selection, checked luggage, etc. and why traditional airlines like BA have been forced to follow suit. Everything is focused on getting the base fare as low as possible.

Ganga

BarryBlue wrote: »

We used to fly to all sorts of obscure places with Ryanair, especially when they had their silly prices of £5, £1, €1 and even 1p. I had an Electron card just to pay Ryanair and we could go for the weekend on cabin bags quite easily. Sadly those days are gone.

I actually wouldn't be bothered about the seating policy. If I don't sit next to the wife for a couple of hours - so what! However, we don't now fly Ryanair for a couple of reasons. One is this frequent cancellation of flights for so-called operational reasons. We've decided to use someone we can rely on.

However, we have another reason too. My daughter works in aviation and her company used to deal with Ryanair, but now they refuse to do so because of their compromising on safety. She informs me that lots of people in the industry won't fly with them either and avoid booking with them for business travel. I don't pretend to understand all the detail but I'm following her advice.

Do they have many accidents/crashes,if they do i have not read about it or seen it flagged up on my computor:eek:

NoodleDoodleMan

You don't have to pay extra.... fly with someone else, then it'll be built into the price

Can you please advise which of the other broadly comparable airlines allows punters to choose their seats at no additional charge?

Then we can all fly with these carriers - problem solved.

AFAIK Thomas Cook, TUI, Jet2 and EasyJet all charge over and above the basic ticket price for pre-booking seats of choice.