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Passengers have more chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot than being allocated middle seats at random on a Ryanair flight, according to new Oxford University analysis.
In recent weeks Ryanair have faced mounting customer criticism, with some accusing the airline of splitting up groups and families, who do not pay an additional charge for reserved seating. These claims have been rejected by the airline which says that customers who do not wish to pay for their preferred seat are randomly allocated one, free of charge.
Last night, the BBC Consumer affairs programme, Watchdog, ran its own investigation to test how random the airline's seating algorithm is.
As part of their tests, groups of four people were sent on four separate Ryanair flights. In each instance every single person was allocated a middle seat. Dr Jennifer Rogers, Director of the new Oxford University Statistical Consultancy was then invited to analyse the data, to work-out the chances of every person getting a middle seat allocated randomly.
By looking at the amount of window, aisle and middle seating available on each flight, at the time of check-in, Dr Rogers, calculated the chances of all four people being randomly given middle seats on each of the flights, to be around 1:540,000,000. The chances of winning the National Lottery jackpot are 1:45,000,000. (This means that you are 10 times more likely to win the lottery than be in a group who are all randomly allocated middle seats.)
Source: Oxford University
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tfried on Sunday July 02 2017, @08:22PM (2 children)
Or put shorter: "If you don't pay up, we'll assign you the worst seat we can." Which does not actually stand out as unprecedented evil, among the many schemes to look good on price comparison sites, while making sure customers will actually pay much more than they expected. Getting caught lying about it is still (and will hopefully remain) newsworthy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:38AM (1 child)
If you don't pay extra to pick a particular seat, from a coding and business perspective it might actually be easier and better to not assign you any seats till much later.
So the ones who pay extra get their choice of seats first, and are likely to take the aisle or window seats and the ones who don't pay extra get what's left which tend to be crappier seats or maybe no seats even - bumped off.
If the study didn't take stuff like that into consideration then the study is worse than Ryan Air ;).
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 03 2017, @02:51PM
From the summary:
Almost all airlines assign you a seat at check-in if you haven't already chosen/been assigned one before (unless you're flying standby or something). So, yes, it seems they took into account the fact that seats were assigned at the last moment before a final ticket was generated.
The point seems to be that the algorithm isn't randomly choosing among remaining available seats -- it's filling up the "less desirable" seats first. And from a business perspective, that's probably a good policy, but it's not the "random" selection process that the company is advertising.