[bmink]

> These seats will increase passenger capacity on airlines by 20 per cent

> Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary […] wants his Boeing's 737 and 800 fitted with 10 rows of them, and 15 rows of traditional seats.

> Michael has suggested the standing tickets may potentially cost as little as £1 to £5.

According to Google, a 737 has a max seating capacity of 230.

Increasing that by 20% would be 46 seats more. So all this to take in around 50-230 pounds (or dollars, whatever) per flight?

[Arnt]

No, that £1 to £5 applies if you're among the first ten to book tickets on that flight. They use a bucket system where the first ten tickets are really cheap, the next ten a little more expensive, etc, and the last ten rather expensive.

I don't think the actual bucket size is ten. But I'm fairly sure that they hope to sell more tickets from the later, more expensive buckets, not from the earliest buckets. They don't plan to fly many almost-empty flights.

[dspillett]

"As little as" is doing a lot of work there. £1..£5 will be a special special price, maybe there will be one in that price range per flight to justify the claim.

Also, that will just be the seat price not the whole ticket price. Try booking anything on their cheapest rates and when you get to the screen where you pick seat preferences you'll find there will never be any that are free (cheaper seats are included in the ticket price for higher priced tickets that include some luggage allowance, and on that screen you can opt to pay extra to get on/off faster or have a few mm more leg room).¹

I wouldn't be surprised if the standing "seats" don't get even the minimum carry-on bag allowance of current seats, and there is an extra charge of you want that back.

Furthermore, on top of that each of those extra passengers is an opportunity to levy any number of other extra optional charges (that might not be all that optional for many passengers).

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[1] last time I looked at flights with them this seat price disparity took away a fair chunk of the price difference between the lowest rate and the next up, and if you wanted any luggage the cheaper flights were more expensive in total.

[rsynnott]

> Michael has suggested the standing tickets may potentially cost as little as £1 to £5.

When Ryanair says "as little as" they very much do _not_ mean "but not more than". They'll be demand-priced like any other Ryanair seat.

[tocs3]

Increasing that by 20% would be 46 seats more. So all this to take in around 50-230 pounds (or dollars, whatever) per flight?

I wonder, if they added 10 rows of these that would only be 4 seats per row.