He’s managed to game the seat reservation system.
Choosing one’s own airplane seats can be agonizing — but travel influencer Jordan Tually says he’s devised a way to avoid being placed in the middle seat without paying a fee.
“This travel hack has saved me from MANY a middle seat over the years,” declared the content creator in a viral Instagram video to his over 450,000 followers. “It’s actually never failed me and has a 100% perfect record when done correctly!”
The viral clip shows Tually checking in online for a Ryanair flight from Bologna, Italy to Barcelona, Spain, on which he would ordinarily have to pay an extra $9 to choose his own seat — something he wanted to avoid.
Unfortunately, not paying the fee and opting for the seat roulette route would’ve been a gamble given that the flight had 10 open middle seats — often voted the worst on the plane alongside the windowless window seats.
Fortunately, the influencer avoided the middle seat minefield for free by pretending to buy the remaining center air chairs.
“Now the website is going to ask for every passenger’s name so just slam a bunch of letters in there and continue on,” Taully explained while pretending to purchase 10 plane tickets.
“Next up, go to seat selection and select all the middle seats or all the seats that you definitely do not want to be sitting in,” he explained. “Then click ‘continue.’”
Jorden explained that the Ryanair website will then “hold” those seats for approximately 10 minutes, which is when you should go back in to legitimately purchase your actual ticket.
“When you go to check in with your ticket, you can see that there’s no more middle seats,” he explained. “So click that random seat allocation… and just like that. It only took me two minutes and now I have a window seat.”
The flight-hacker added in the caption that this shortcut is “easiest when done on a computer and even easier if you do it closer to check-in as fewer seats are available.”
Armchair travelers were impressed that Tually managed to figuratively have his cake and eat it too.
“Damn this is genius! Any win over Ryanair is a win for humanity,” fawned one fan.
“This is such a useful hack, hopefully, they don’t catch on,” another thrifty flier declared.
However, others argued that Tually shouldn’t have posted the tutorial because Ryanair would inevitably catch wise.
“This needs to be gatekept,” declared one viewer.
One alleged Ryanair employee claimed they’d already sounded the alarm, saying: “I’m a product owner working for Ryanair and I just created a ticket to prevent such behavior. Thanks for reporting!”
Meanwhile, many felt that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
“This is not a hack. It’s being cheap as f–k,” said one armchair traveler. “If you focus this much energy on making more money, you’d be flying first class.”
