Checking in on a flight is always a dreadful experience. Which seat will you get? Between whom will you get stuck? How much more do you have to pay to add your carry-on and whatnot? Maybe paying for an aisle or window seat add a bit of extra spice to your in-flight experience, but it’s not quite fun if you’re flying low-cost to pay more for a seat than for the ticket itself.
Travel influencer Jorden Tually has come up with a way to save us from this misery. “This travel hack has saved me from MANY a middle seat over the years. It’s actually never failed me and has a 100% perfect record when done correctly,” said Tually in his viral Instagram video. In the clip, Tually is checking in on a Ryanair flight from Bologna to Barcelona. However, he said that he didn’t want to pay the 8 euro fee to pick his seat.
He came up with a trick to skip the middle seat by pretending to buy the remaining middle chairs. “Now the website is going to ask for every passenger’s name so just slam a bunch of letters in there and continue on,” he explained. Once you do this, “go to seat selection and select all the middle seats or all the seats that you definitely do not want to be sitting in. Then click continue,” he further added.
After doing this, Jorden explained that the airline website, in this case Ryanair, will keep those seats on “hold” for about 10 minutes. This is when you go and actually check in for yourself. “When you go to check in with your ticket, you can see that there’s no more middle seats. So, click that random seat allocation… and just like that. It only took me two minutes and now I have a window seat,” he concluded.
Different people commented under the video. While some called the hack “genius”, others said the seat fee is not worth all the trouble if you really want to avoid the middle seat, which, according to other users, is not even that bad.
