The Great Seating Dilemma

The Great Seating Dilemma

*Note: I feel like I should mention that following the lengthy diatribe below, which does show poor service it has to be said (and was accurate), I have been since contacted by CheapOair who say they are working to improve the seat selection as per the original request; “Mr. McFarlane, very sorry for the inconvenience regarding your seat selection, we are currently working on improving the seat selection for your convenience, and per your original request.” I will let you know how we get on with that here – although, that was Thursday and here we are on Monday with no update yet.

With our next forthcoming trip looming large on the horizon, and the nasty memories of us both having to sit all over the place separately on our last Etihad flights due to their very bizarre seating system which more or less guarantees you won’t sit together shy of super-mega frequent flyer status, or a divine intervention, we decided to take matters into our own hands this time.

By the way, before someone corrects me on the Etihad seating issue – yes, we did try to pick seats together at time of booking, that’s how far back we were talking. Needless to say their friendly Dublin handling staff were only too delighted to tell us there was nothing they could do. It seems to be something that, with the exception of Aer Lingus, I can never win on.

This time, we had booked with CheapoAir as Malaysian’s own site doesn’t seem to have the sense or ability to package the Aer Lingus Dublin to wherever connecting flight, a prerequisite to get bags checked in all the way and boarding cards issued. Aer Lingus’ site meanwhile is programmed to sell you tickets on their partners, so their ticket to Kuala Lumpur will take you on an extremely expensive Etihad routing all the way. It’s very complicated.

After a few weeks of CheapoAir (what a name) letting me know about their Enhanced Seating Program that promises to more or less hand-hold and cosset you into your seat, I decided to take the plunge and go for it – now, I wanted to see the map as you can imagine and while it says a very small notice before you click (which you actually could accidentally it’s that easy) that there’s a charge for theÂ ‘program’ – what it doesn’t tell you, is that it actually charges you when you click to the credit card which you originally used, which in my mind anyway is a stunning abuse of keeping a credit card number on file. I actually couldn’t believe it – no warnings that the transaction is imminent or about to happen (you would presume it would be later on by the way it’s worded). No, charged – to a credit card I used some months ago. Unreal!

Anyway, for the privilege of the enhanced program, you still can’t pick any seats with Aer Lingus – which suited me fine anyway as I know they’ll offer up the best in house at check-in anyway, but I’d have been disgusted otherwise.

Malaysia’s seats meanwhile, I went for row 42, window and middle. Job done, confirm, all happy.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went back online (by chance) later to find we now had seats 65 middle and even more middle. Needless to say I wasn’t for paying their international number for the US or UK and hit up online chat;