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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


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 03 2017, @03:04PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday July 03 2017, @03:04PM (#534449) Journal

    Are you saying that they deliberately stuck people in all the middle seats, and left the aisle and window seats empty?

    Yes, at least at the time they checked in. Assuming the summary is accurate, it seems to indicate the algorithm likely prioritizes filling in "less desirable" seats first when people check in. The hope being, I assume, that the airline can still sell SOME people checking in later on "upgrades" to take the remaining aisle and window seats, etc. If the system is consistent in prioritizing "less desirable" seats, I'd assume after it exhausted middle seats, it would start filling window and aisle seats from the back of the plane or something, leaving the generally more desirable ones toward the front of the plane available.

    Nobody wants to pay extra for a middle seat, unless I suppose you have a tight connection and need to be really close to the front of the plane. So if the algorithm truly randomly filled up seats, there might not be any aisle or window options left by the time the last groups of people are checking in, meaning there's less chance for the company to make extra money off of seat upgrades.

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