As part of our Always Getting Better programme it's now mandatory for adults to have a reserved seat when travelling with kids, this means you don't need to worry about being separated on board."

Works in the flight deck as well. (Tongue in cheek and can be moved to Friday Jokes. It's time for some light heartedness)

I believe all EU regs will be adopted until they are looked at some time in the future. The more controversial regs will be looked at first, as I understand it.

I don't see the point myself...

Liar Liar! There is absolutely nothing random about it!
There's a whole logic of seating people in a specific order (and apart from each other if it involves multiple people on the same booking).

I presume they trialled this and it was worth it, but I'm surprised it's not all going to make it take much longer to board planes.

Will RYR now have a new 'in-house' Delay Code for passenger playing musical chairs during bordering?

This is not the case. Seats cost "From £2". I booked a late October to Girona this week, seat map was totally empty at time of booking. There were no £2 seats, they all started at £4. I didn't book any but I probably will later.

That cost increases from £4 to £6 for the same seat after purchasing the flight and retrospectively attempting to buy the same seat. (2 mins after completing the booking!)

I refused to fly Ryanair for 10 years after a shocking customer service experience. It seemed things had improved recently so I decided to give them another chance.

Now the misinformation and contempt for passengers appears to be returning. Don't get me wrong, Im not complaining about prices, my issue is the policy of deliberately misleading and forcing people to pay to sit together.

Someone more knowledgable than me can answer this, is this constant seat swapping a safety issue? Can the aircraft become unbalanced in an event that people start vacating their seats for an empty one beside travel groups? Obviously this can be dealt with when on the ground (they can refuse to depart if pax dont take their allocated seats), but once in the air it becomes a lot more difficult.

I couldn't agree with you more. I thought FR had become a more straightforward airline and have been enjoying travelling with them. If you wanted extras you were able to buy them. But this new seat policy is so manipulative and disingenuous, you just end up trying to find reasons not to fly with them. Not that Wizz are better (they even charge extra for a window seat), but some airlines are. I understand charging extra for a seat with more legroom. Or why not just make it a compulsory £2 charge for selecting your seat - like an admin fee? All this craftiness and scheming just creates so much ill will

Surprised to hear that. I always purchase a seat at the time of booking and over the past, at least, 50 bookings (including one made yesterday) have not paid more than €2 per seat. I always buy the cheapest as I'm not bothered what area of the aircraft I sit in.

What would have been interesting, entertaining and scary all at once, was to be a 'fly on the wall' at the committee meeting that spent hours dreaming up these schemes. Supposed hi-powered execs, who should have better things to do, sitting around a table brain storming about such irritating trivia and then the head honcho coming to a decision and sticking a pin in the worse one.
What rise in profit was this supposed to generate? What loss in profit has it caused? Probably zero in both cases.

I too was surprised, ayroplain. I've even gone back to try and find (what is now) a £4 seat. All seats are still available and all middle seats from overwing exit row to the rear are £4.

As jdcg rightly says, it is all very disingenuous. No doubt, legally they only have to offer a single £2 seat anywhere on the network to be covered with the 'from £2' statement.

They are definitely back to the trying to scam passengers.

Even when not a single £2 seat is available, the seat booking page still shows "Book your seat from £2".

"Book your seat from £2".

Please don't tell me they are using the 'from' scam? On January 2 at 06.30 there was 1 seat for £2; after that you are on your own and the earlier you reserve the cheaper it is.

I tried to book a flight where the cheapest seats were £6.

Ditching that I went to add a bag, and on doing so I realised that adding suitcases on their own cost more than "leisure plus"...

I think they are pathologically incapable of being straightforward to deal with, in the same way as BA are pathologically incapable of going a certain number of bank holiday weekends without people camping in Heathrow...

It is very much in Ryanair's interest for the extra price differential to be cheaper than adding one or two additions manually. Ryanair know that for each 'added value' package, people usually care about just one or two items - the rest are there to bulk up and persuade customers they are getting a bargain once u compare the cost of how much the full set of extras would be if added in manually

If customers know that it's cheaper to add a suitcase the day before they fly, then there is no point buying a 'value' package at the time of initial booking several months before the flight. By making the package cheaper, custoners are scared into buying an 'additional package' when making the original booking but then find on flight date the value package is nor really needed and money was wasted.

Unless a consumer rebellion starts, this is a tactic based around FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt to boost the ancillaries amount customers spend per booking

Flew in Apr 2ad and 1 ch. booked 3 seats outbound for £2 each and £4 for return. Bargain in my eyes and lots cheaper than TUI and TCook. Always book seats to be sure we are together. For those that don't and take a chance do not cry if you are split up.

Bargain in my eyes and lots cheaper than TUI and TCook.

Pax are allowing themselves to be treated like muppets. It is only 17 years ago that (I think it was) BMI started charging for baggage. Easyjet & others said they would watch with interest. They saw no reduction in pax numbers so climbed aboard the add-ons train very quickly and turned it into an art form. From that RYR redefined customer service is that nothing is for free. Ez did there same and now it has fed through to national carriers. Pax are now brain washed that this is the norm. There is a generation or 2 that have never known anything else. Now pax are punch drunk into believing that it is necessary to pay to reserve a block of seats so that all pax on the same booking ref can sit together. What they should be asking is why are all pax on a single booking ref not being put together as the norm. Pax are allowing the tail to wag the dog and rolling over to ask for more of this c#$p. To suggest that one airline charging only £2 is OK because others charge £4 is mind boggling crassness. There should be no charge for a seat unless it is in some form of upgrade. An economy seat is an economy seat. Sitting next to your colleague traveller on the same booking ref should be the standard norm. Point!.

Like to old joke about an airline CEO walking into a pub. The tempting advert outside had said Guinness, the cheapest in town; only 50p a pint." The CEO orders one at the bar. The barman asked, "will you be wanting a glass with that? And are you going to sit down? Will that be on a cheap bar stool or a premium lounge chair? Have you pre-reserved one?" etc. etc. The final price for a pint of guinness in a chair rises from 50p to £5.

On the flip side, airfares have fallen massively from those days. I recently flew to Newcastle and back for the lovely sum of €16. No baggage, no reserved seats. Even my flights to the canaries this summer, were very reasonable, even with check in baggage. Could I have gotten anything remotely close to this 25 years ago? No.

Reliability has also increased massively, it's rare that I'd ever get a flight delay amounting to more than an hour.

Route choice and route frequency is the biggest winner here though, the cheap lead in fares have caused millions of more passengers to fly, meaning alot more routes and alot more choice on these routes. Charge everyone flying between the UK and ROI £100 each way lead in fares in exchange for a full service experience and see how many passengers avail of this! I can tell ya we wouldn't have the same choice of routes and frequencies we have today!

Rat 5. I think you miss my point. I am not paying extra for my seat I am paying to ensure my family are sat together. In years gone by when seats were allocated at check in those at the back got what was left often split up. This resulted in hassle for everyone and many pax seat changed when boarding. Prices are now low and then you then choose your add ons for your personal preference.
Aer Arran. Quite agree.

This word "free" keeps popping up. Hard to believe that there are people on here who actually believe that the likes of BA et al were providing all those extra services, handling baggage and dishing out food onboard for "free" (out of the goodness of their hearts). There is more than a generation or 2 still around that knows that airfares were miles out of their range because of the sky-high prices. £400 return from LHR to DUB being one example. Only for the rich and famous..and politicians.

Nowadays, in stark contrast, we are paying buttons for the basic fare and, if we prefer we can leave it that, or buy some addons. The choices are there. I'd much rather have it that way.