Last nights BBC consumer program, Watchdog, looked into Ryanair’s seating policy after receiving many complaints.
They booked 4 seats on 4 different flight, to test the randomness of seat allocation when not paying to choose a seat.
On all 4 flights the 4 pax were seated separately and all in the middle row only. They then asked a statistician to work out the odds of that happening randomly and it was 1 in 543million.
They then had an interview with Kenny Jacobs, RA head of marketing, who said ‘we do not separate people’ and that the policy had not changed since 2014. He went on to say ‘it’s not about making more money’ also ‘if you don’t like it you can pay 2 euros’
When asked why pax seated separately, but with empty seats next to them, could not be seated together he said ‘then whats the point in having reserved seating’.
Interestingly, a travel agent reckons that the date the changes were implemented was 15 May.
Even when faced with all the evidence and a high number of complaints he still insisted that unpaid seating was random.