People who have flown via Ryanair might have noticed their seat allocating facility. You can book seats at base rates, but you need to pay extra if you want to select your seats. Because of the short distances, people usually refuse to pay extra for seat selection and they are happy about the randomly allocated seats.
But, recently it has been alleged that people who travel together via Ryanair who doesn’t pay extra for seat selection, are purposely assigned distant seats so that they can’t sit together.
Ryanair has denied that it has made any modifications to its free seat-allocation system despite hundreds of people coming forward to say they had been separated from travelling companions when flying with the airline in recent weeks because they had not paid for specific seats.
n response the airline insisted there had been “no change in Ryanair policy”. “When a customer does not purchase a seat, they are then randomly allocated a seat, which has always been our policy,” it said.
It insisted the reason so many people were being separated from travelling companions now is not because the airline is seeking to maximise profits by forcing passengers keen to sit with travelling companions to pay for seats.
Instead, it said, it was because “95 per cent of the seats on our flights are full and we are now in the peak of summer travel, raising the prospect of more people choosing not to reserve a seat experiencing this issue”.
This claim runs contrary to the experiences of many passengers who have said that they and their companions were separated even on flights described as half empty.
The airline also played down safety considerations raised by some passengers who questioned what would happen in an emergency situation if panicked families were separated.