Ryanair IS deliberately splitting up groups of passengers who don’t pay to reserve seats, claim scientists

A NEW Oxford University study claims to show that Ryanair IS  splitting groups of passengers into random middle seats on purpose if they don't pay to reserve seats.

But low-cost airline has hit back - saying its customers are just confused by the booking system.

In recent weeks, furious Ryanair passengers have accused the low-cost airline of changing its seating policy so that travellers from the same booking are split up.

Couples and people travelling in groups complain that they are being punished with separate middle seats in different rows if they don’t pay an additional charge for reserved seating.

Until today, these accusations have been denied by the airline, who said that customers who do not wish to pay for their preferred seat are randomly allocated one, free of charge.

But the airline's claims was rubbished by a new study by Oxford University Statistical Consultancy, who say that the seating allocation is far from random.

In fact, passengers have more chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot than being allocated middle seats at random on a Ryanair flight.

Last night, the BBC Consumer affairs programme, Watchdog, ran its own investigation to test how random the airline’s seating algorithm and as part of their tests, groups of four people were sent on four separate Ryanair flights.

In each instance every single person was allocated a middle seat.

Dr Jennifer Rogers, Director of the new Oxford University Statistical Consultancy was then invited to analyse the data, to work-out the chances of every person getting a middle seat allocated randomly.

By looking at the amount of window, aisle and middle seating available on each flight, at the time of check-in, Dr Rogers, calculated the chances of all four people being randomly given middle seats on each of the flights, to be around 1:540,000,000.

The chances of winning the National Lottery jackpot are 1:45,000,000.

This means that you are 10 times more likely to win the lottery than be in a group who are all randomly allocated middle seats.

To support her analysis, Dr Rogers was also given access to data from a further 26 individuals, from nine groups, who had been separated from their party when travelling with Ryanair.

Of the 26 people, 21 had been allocated middle seats, and in 11 of the total 13 groups assessed, each person had been given a middle seat.

Dr Rogers also looked at whether row allocation played a part in the seating arrangement, observing that passengers were often scattered throughout the plane.

She found that a person within a group would, on average, be sat 10 rows away from someone else from their group.

While Ryanair had previously denied specifically allocating middle seats, the airline has now admitted that they do avoid giving aisle and window seats to people who don't pay a reservation fee.

A Ryanair spokesperson told Sun Online: "Some random seat passengers are confused by the appearance of empty seats beside them when they check-in up to four days prior to departure."

They added: "The reason they can’t have these window or aisle seats is that these are more likely to be selected by reserved seat passengers, many of whom only check-in 24 hours prior to departure.

"Since our current load factor is 95 per cent, we have to keep these window and aisle seats free to facilitate those customers who are willing to pay for them.

"We are not trying to force people to pay for reserved seats. We are very happy to facilitate any customer who wants a free of charge random seat but we are also going to do our best to facilitate customers who are willing to pay for a reserved seat."