Although seat selection is really not a major deal when booking a flight with Vueling Airlines, I did commit a minor error which would have cost me a minimal amount of money during one of my rare moments of not paying complete attention to what I was doing.
Be Careful When Selecting a Seat With Vueling Airlines
Sometimes when I am in the process of booking a flight, I like to play around with the options first to see what choices I am given.
Using a simulated flight reservation which was never completed, I randomly chose a one-way flight from Reykjavik to Barcelona on Thursday, September 20, 2018.
I was greeted with a screen offering different airfares.
When I selected the basic airfare of $143.26, an alert appeared informing me of upgrading to the Optima fare, which cost an additional $31.14.
I chose to bypass that offer…
…and if I wanted to reserve the least expensive seat towards the rear of the airplane along with baggage, I actually would save $4.99 over the Optima fare if I paid $21.18 for a bag to check and $4.97 for an assigned seat in the rear of the aircraft separately.
The front row seat is what is included with the Optima fare — and if that is the seat which I preferred, I would have instead saved a grand total of $2.49.
I decided to click on the Choose seats button to see what seats were available.
The seats are color coded and priced accordingly — at least in the front of the airplane…
…but what momentarily tripped me up was that all of the seats in the rear of the aircraft were the same yellow color — so if I was not paying attention, I would have thought that the seats in row 19 were the same price as the seats in row 26. The thin lines separate the less expensive seats from the more expensive seats; and the prices are listed on the left.
Once a seat is selected and the reservation is booked, that is it: a change of seats will invoke a fee.
Summary
I did book a reservation for a flight operated by Vueling Airlines for later this year; and it will be my first experience with that airline. I intend to post a review of the flight in a future article.
If I were paying for a reserved seat, I would like to see the seats of different prices in different shades of yellow for further visual differentiation — but unless you are booking flight reservations for a family or large group, the difference in price should typically be minimal. Still, when purchasing a product or service which incurs a fee on Vueling Airlines — or most other ultra-low-cost airlines — ensure that you remain completely aware of what you are doing and keep yourself completely informed. After all, the low airfares are not what brings in the profits for these airlines — rather, the ancillary fees are the cash cows; and these airlines further benefit from the fees they charge for any errors which you commit.
Fortunately, I rarely ever check a bag and avoid that whenever possible — and for an inexpensive flight which is not long-haul on an airline with which I have no elite level status, I usually do not care about where my seat is located…
Photograph ©2014 by Brian Cohen.
