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Ryanair Random Seat Allocation is Not So Random Says Expert

posted by martyb on Sunday July 02 2017, @05:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the dicey-analysis dept.

Fnord666 writes:

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

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday July 03 2017, @03:25AM (1 child)

    by Mykl (1112) on Monday July 03 2017, @03:25AM (#534323)

    This article should have the by-line of 'Duh'.

    • Those people who pay to select seats would vastly reduce the number of non-middle seats out of the 'random' pool, so assuming a random distribution across the whole plane is foolish
    • The sample size of 16 is statistically invalid anyway - not only for all flights on the day of the test (which would have been tens of thousands of passengers), but in fact for each individual flight as well (4 out of a couple of hundred)
    • The article is poorly worded, suggesting that getting a middle seat is a 'good' outcome.
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  • (Score: 1) by chair on Monday July 03 2017, @03:54PM

    by chair (6194) on Monday July 03 2017, @03:54PM (#534466)

    Those people who pay to select seats would vastly reduce the number of non-middle seats out of the 'random' pool, so assuming a random distribution across the whole plane is foolish

    from the summary:

    By looking at the amount of window, aisle and middle seating available on each flight, at the time of check-in

    ---

    The sample size of 16 is statistically invalid anyway - not only for all flights on the day of the test (which would have been tens of thousands of passengers), but in fact for each individual flight as well (4 out of a couple of hundred)

    From the (very short) FA:

    To support her analysis, Dr Rogers was also given access to data from a further 26 individuals, from nine groups,