Budget Travel - easyJet to trial allocated seating

easyJet have announced they are, from March, to trial fully-allocated seating (i.e. legacy-airline-style, not the limited version Ryanair were trialling) on selected routes.

The plan is that normal passengers can pay to select a seat in advance, or pay more for an exit/front row, while easyJet Plus cardholders will get normal seat selection for free but still have to pay for exit/front rows. This is somewhat of a devaluation for the card, which some of us use specifically to get exit row seating...

If you don't pay extra and you don't have a Plus card, you'll just get allocated a random seat, with groups on the same booking allocated seats together so far as possible.

Good or bad? I'm undecided - I certainly might consider giving up my easyJet Plus card and just taking random seat allocations if I can't have any sort of "subscription" to the exit rows... I wouldn't mind if the seat pitch wasn't so tight in normal rows (29" if I recall).

Neil

Good move, I think. It's the boarding gate scrum that I dislike most about easyJet - this would almost take it back to the good old days of Go (who provided a great number of U2's planes and STN routes at the time!)

I suggested to them they should have two levels of "membership" card - easyJet Plus would be about £100 as at present and would offer free selection of any seat except exit/front row plus the current benefits, while you could have something like "easyJet Gold" that was say £150 or so and would offer free selection of any seat including those rows.

Or, I suppose, they could bring in a "true" FF scheme, which might have a tier that gives you them for free, as many do on other airlines.

I would be interested in either approach (it would, after all, increase my chances of getting those seats), but if the only way to get the exit row is to pay a one-off fee that will cost me too much (flying 2x weekly) to be worth it, particularly given that on the Airbus you only get a couple of inches extra rather than the double-legroom "superseat" on the old 737s, so I might just give up on easyJet Plus and risk a middle seat.

Neil

(to be fair, middle doesn't overly bother *me* - but it might bother those either side of me, as while not particularly fat I'm fairly broad shouldered).