Journalist shares trick to get a better Ryanair seat for free
A British journalist known as the "Coupon King" has shared a method on social media for avoiding Ryanair's seat selection fee. The trick relies on temporarily blocking window and aisle seats through fake bookings.
Budget airlines such as Ryanair build their pricing around a bare-bones base fare, charging extra for comforts like checked baggage or a chosen seat. Airlines reportedly use various tactics to push passengers toward paying more — staff are said to receive bonuses for catching oversized carry-on bags, while passengers who skip paid seat selection are often randomly assigned less desirable middle seats.
British journalist Jordon Cox, who calls himself the "Coupon King," explained on Instagram how travelers can avoid Ryanair's seat selection fee. According to him, the airline charges roughly £20–30 (about €23–35) per passenger for choosing a seat, which he describes as pure profit-grabbing.
How the trick works
Cox recommends checking, on the day of departure — ideally five to six hours before the flight — which seats are still available in the seat selection section. Most of the remaining free options are usually middle seats. The next step is to open a new browser tab and start booking fake tickets for the same flight, entering made-up passenger names and assigning each of them an undesirable seat.
If many seats remain open, this may require creating more than ten fictitious passengers. Because these seats end up in another shopper's cart, the airline's system temporarily locks them as taken. At that point, travelers should return to their real booking and complete check-in, selecting the free randomly assigned seat option. Since the middle seats are now artificially "reserved," Cox says the system should then assign one of the remaining seats — a window or aisle spot.
