Here is a short extract from the story today:
Originally Posted by Sunday Times
Couples and families booking long-haul flights through British Airways are being asked to pay extra to ensure they are able to sit together.In one recent case, a couple on a transatlantic flight were automatically allocated seats several rows apart — and had to pay more than £100 to be able to sit close to each other, moving to a seat that had been unoccupied anyway.
That specific example mentioned above - and of course we're never going to get the details but genuinely that is all the details we have - seems to relate to a Basic longhaul fare. There were 2 other examples in the story, one of someone complaining that they didn't get free advance seat selection when travelling with a 14 year old (so it may be that Theoretical Seating would eventually have put them together anyway) and a case from AA! BA's response was to flatly deny the premise of the story (that the airline was splitting up passengers in a cynical move to extract money out of them) and BA went on to say "Some 98% of families are seated together by the airline. Our seat selection process is in line with 15 other airlines flying out of the UK". That would be a reference to Amadeus Seating and Theoretical Seating, which are implemented via the Altéa software and is not at all propriety to BA.
I also think this story is rubbish, I suspect the journalist concerned heard of a case near to home (maybe a friend of his) and wove the story around one single example. What we do know to be true is
- generally BA's flights go out full
- basic fares are advertised as "no free seat selection at all" even at OLCI unless you have status
- that there are a huge proportion of the airline's business which is repeat business and therefore consists of Bronze plus shiny cardholders who take the best options
- in common with almost all large airlines some good seats are held back, so leaving it to OLCI will often come up with the dregs
- not in common with all airlines, Theoretical Seating actually does a pretty good job in keeping groups together, I think FT now gets few complaints about this than it used to do
- if it's important, pay for it, if it isn't then don't (and ideally don't moan about it). That applies to upgrades, lounges, seating, flight timings, ticket flexibility, LGW v LHR and so on.
For the specifics here there is a lot we don't know, but if they checked in at the dot of T-24, and didn't print their boarding passes, there would have been a good chance that the seats concerned would have come up a few hours later. What isn't often considered in these stories is what the other 301 passengers were getting up to, we all live in a nice bubble here So maybe the empty seat referred to is someone who decided to select another seat, took a POUG, decided not to travel, had an irrop, got into a drunken stupor and overslept and so on. Equally the seat may not have been empty (so allocated to a non status passenger who hasn't checked in) but the airport or OLCI sold the seat to them because they were willing to pay for it. Or maybe the couple here just checked in at the last moment Or of course one of the passengers had status and was on a separate booking.
But fundamentally, I don't think we've seen any evidence to back up this story. Ryanair is fairly open that their seating algorithm does game couples and families this way, and it is easy to spot in real life. This forum has minutely followed how TS works, and has a very long thread about it in the Dashboard, so I think like
Prospero it's beyond unlikely that this would have slipped under our collective radar.