Will airlines separate us if we don't pay for seats?
Booking tickets together does not guarantee you will sit side-by-side, as airlines often randomly assign separate seats during check-in. To ensure children stay with adults or partners sit together, passengers are forced to pay hundreds extra for advance seat selection on top of already expensive base fares.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- People have been saying this in most months since September 2026.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Paying extra at the airport or online to select adjacent seatsDid this help you?
- 2Switching to preferred legacy carriers or alliancesDid this help you?
- 3Paying extra for higher fare classes or seat selection fees to guarantee seats together.Did this help you?
- 4Waiting for online check-in 48 hours before departure to pick remaining free seats.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“On the way back my partner and I got seated in separate middle seats when checking in. Not next to each other, not even close, just randomly split up.”source ↗
“So to actually sit next to each other we'd have basically had to buy two seats. For a route we already paid £2,200 for.”source ↗
“If we wait until online check-in (48 hrs before departure) to select our seats, is there a real possibility that our children could be seated separately from an adult?”source ↗
“Would you recommend paying extra for a fare that allows advance seat selection, or is Super Saver generally fine for families? It would be 700€ more for the 4 of us.”source ↗
Where this came up
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