Please sign in to post.

Worth it to reserve seats on plane?

Hello! Well, my wife and I take off for Belgium and Paris in less than 2 weeks, and I have what I hope to be a final question: does it make sense to reserve our seats so that we can ensure we sit together? It will cost $80 total, but $80 is $80, so if it is relatively easy to sit together I would prefer to save some $$. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Posted by
2599 posts

Some people like to take chances on where they sit and whether or not they'll be able to sit with their companions; I'm not one of them so I always pay to reserve my seat. Going over I like the window so I can sleep undisturbed, and coming back either the window or aisle is fine. The middle seat is never fine.

Posted by
1419 posts

For me it's totally worth it. For our trip next year I reserved our seats when I booked the tickets. We were able to get a 2 seat bulkhead row.

Posted by
7049 posts

I think you should discuss with your wife directly... "should we pay $80 to sit together, or risk sitting apart and saving the $80?". She's the only one affected by this decision so the "worth" can only be calculated by you and her. From what I've seen, couples seem to prefer to sit across from each other in the aisles, as opposed to together.

How easy it would be to get seats together without advanced booking depends on how booked the flight is, and no one can answer that. You could luck out or you could lose...so it really depends how important it is for you to sit together. The airlines know this and that's why they rip off people like this. Seat selection doesn't impose any additional costs for them, but yet they've found a way to squeeze more revenue out of people.

Posted by
7731 posts

I am a frugal traveler never paid to select a seat (except for an upgrade).
Whenever I traveled with another person 3 times the last two years) on the same booking (PNR), the system automatically sat us together.

Also I use to work at the airlines before and we always had briefings about potential problems like a couple being split. And whenever we had people booked as a party of 2, 3, etc. the system would default to sit the group together. But it does happen that the plane will be overbooked;and if you check in late then it is possible that there will not be any seats for you and your wife to sit together.

Posted by
88 posts

Thanks all. I ended up doing it, because it was only $63, and our tickets from BWI to Brussels were around $280 per person!