Personally I think it is. If its a domestic flight I wouldn't be too bothered.

I refuse to pay a rnsom to it togthr. OK for many yers we have done so anywa Some years ago I was contacted by Thomson to discuss a complaint, during the discussions I was asked for my views on several other points. I raised the question of seating together and asked about the criteria they applied. I pointed out that when someone books a holiday and there are more than the lead name on the booking it was logical that they would wish to be seated together. I pointed out the requirement for you to pay to ensure you did so was viewed by many as just another rip off.

Given the recent announcement that the CAA are looking into the deliberate splitting of party bookings during the online check-in process used by many tour operators/airlines in order to "encourage" people to pay for their seats to be allocated together I felt it opportune to post a link to this article:
https://consultations.caa.co.uk/policy-development/airline-seating-allocations/

"The CAA is interested in your experiences of seating arrangements when you have booked airline tickets as a group. By this we mean flying anywhere (i.e. inside or outside the UK) with more than one person (e.g. with a partner, friends, family, colleagues etc).
Please complete the survey below, to tell us about the flight you took and what happened with your seating arrangements. At the end of the multiple choice questions about your flight, we have invited you to describe what happened in up to 1,000 words.
This survey is a chance for the CAA to gather information about the way airlines allocate seats. Your response will not be treated as a complaint, but we many choose to contact airlines to discuss any issues that occur when we review your response. We will not be responding to you individually."

I've never paid for seats together except on one occasion when we were due to return to UK after living overseas in Cyprus for many years. We were flying our dogs the day after we arrived so decided to book the easyJet Flexi option which gave us allocated seats but more importantly, the freedom to change our reservation should anything untoward happened to our dogs whilst they were in kennels a couple of days before their flight.
That's the one and only time.....

Recently, we've taken a couple of package holidays and found on the first occasion when using the online check-in our 3 seats on the outbound flight were allocated together but on the inbound flight we were each on a separate row from each other.

I immediately contacted the tour op and after about 20 minutes of badgering via their social media account, they rejigged their system so I could check-in again and our seats were all allocated together on one row.

Bear in mind, when checking in online I could see each empty row of seats with lots of rows of 3 seats - so why were the inbound separated?

Again this year, going to the online check-in our seats were separated on both parts of the journey and again, still lots of full rows of empty seats.

They wanted £66 for us to be allocated all seats together for both journeys, something we were most unwilling to pay on top of a holiday costing over £1,830 for 2 weeks in Benidorm plus £100+ for our taxi transfer to Manchester airport and back. It was a definite "No" from me!

Again, onto the social media account, this time attaching screenshots of said vacant rows and within 20 minutes an email came through with allocated seat numbers for both flights. All I had to do was complete the check-in process again and print the boarding cards.

So, if you have travelled between February and early March this year and have been "persuaded" to pay for seats together because of an enforced separation, please fill in the survey on the CAA link posted above!

We fly budget airlines & if travelling with hubby we pay for seats. Mainly because husband prefers window & for me it's the aisle. On both legs, last year, the middle seat was occupied by a person who was travelling as a couple with their partner being at the opposite end of the plane.

We pay about £3 per seat & £5 priority boarding each, per flight. We do this as we want to ensure our luggage isn't put in the hold.