TRAVELLERS have complained for months about Ryanair’s new seating policy, which they believe punishes customers with separate middle seats in different rows if they don’t pay an additional charge for reserved seating.
But it hasn’t hurt the airline’s business – the unpopular new seating allocation system has actually earned at least £15million extra this year.
Couples and people travelling in groups have been complaining for months about the new system.
The accusations were initially denied by the airline, who said that customers who do not wish to pay for their preferred seat are randomly allocated one, free of charge.
But yesterday, Ryanair’s Chief Marketing Officer admitted they do hold back aisle and window seats for people who are willing to pay.
In a new story today in The Telegraph, CMO Kenny Jacobs also revealed that their new policy was netting them millions of extra pounds in revenue.
He said: “It’s settled down down and it’s working well, we’ve seen more [passengers paying for seat reservations] – about 10 per cent more.
“If I go back to the start of the year it was about 40 per cent and now it’s about half.”
He continued: “As the story evolved people said it used to be 0 per cent and now suddenly everyone has to take a reserved seat.
“But it was 40 per cent already and now more and more customers choose to select particular seats, since we introduced reserved seating about three years ago.”
Given that Ryanair flew 73,870,000 passengers from January to July this year, that works out at more than 7.4 million extra passengers paying to choose a seat, from £2 a pop.
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Ryanair hit the headlines again earlier this month when it revealed it was going to restrict non-priority passengers to just one piece of hand luggage, after its two-carry on bag policy proved too popular with customers.
With passengers numbers reaching 97 percent capacity in August, the budget airline said its overhead cabin space is getting too crowded with carry-on bags.