Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday July 03 2017, @09:22AM

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Monday July 03 2017, @09:22AM (#534387)

    Probably, the algorithm used is not random at all. There is probably a list of free seats sorted by "quality" and a new customer gets assigned the best seat he or she is qualified for (which is the worst on the list for the non-reserving customers: quality-eligibility of 0). The randomness is produced by the random seat allocation order as induced by human behavior. So the claim of Ryanair of producing random seat allocation is correct. Collecting many seat assignments will reveal the precise distribution in effect.

    TFA is a staggering display of trying to be sensationalist at the cost of displaying absence of common sense.