Secret travel hack to avoid the dreaded middle seat on an airplane without paying extra

No one wants to get stuck sitting in the middle seat while flying. 

The center spot offers the least personal space – not to mention the fact it has no window view, limited access to the aisle and only half an armrest to use. 

Now, an avid flyer has revealed a genius hack that he claimed has a secret hack that ‘has a 100 percent perfect record,’ which allows people to avoid the dreaded middle seat free of charge. 

Travel influencer Jordan Tually explained that if flyers ‘pretend’ to buy every available middle seat, prompting the system to hold those spots.

‘And that’s when you go to book yours,’ Tually said in a video.

When travelers book their real flight, all the middle seats will appear taken, leaving only window and aisle spaces as options.

‘Did you know with budget airlines, if you click random seat allocation, they will intentionally put you in the middle seat in the hopes that you pay money to get out of it?’ He asked in a video posted on his Instagram.

In the video, Tually demonstrates how to avoid this while booking a Ryanair flight from Bologna, Italy to Barcelona, Spain online. 

Ordinarily, he would have to pay a $9 fee to choose his seat. But this hack allowed him to secure a window seat for free.  

First, he took a look at the flight’s seating map to figure out how many middle seats were available on the plane. In this case, there were 10 of them.

Then, he pretended to purchase 10 tickets for this flight. 

‘Now the website is going to ask for every passenger’s name so just slam a bunch of letters in there and continue on,’ Tually explained.

‘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 said. ‘Then click ‘continue.” 

This causes the Ryanair website to hold those seat for 10 to 15 minutes, which means they will appear unavailable to other customers trying to book a seat. 

In a video posted on his Instagram page, Tually demonstrated how you can make sure you don’t get placed in a middle seat by ‘pretending’ to purchase all the available middle seats on the plane before you buy your actual ticket

‘And that’s when you book yours,’ Tually said. Now, you can pull up the website in a different tab and actually purchase your real ticket. 

‘When you go to check in with your ticket, you can see that there’s no more middle seats,’ he said. 

‘So click that random seat allocation… and just like that. It only took me two minutes and now I have a window seat.’ 

This hack is most easily executed on a computer, ‘and even easier if you do it closer to check-in as fewer seats are available, Tually added. 

Some viewers were impressed by this thrifty shortcut. 

‘Damn this is genius! Any win over Ryanair is a win for humanity,’ one commented.

‘This is such a useful hack, hopefully, they don’t catch on,’ another wrote. 

But others saw it as cheapskate behavior. 

‘This is not a hack. It’s being cheap as f***,’ commented one critic. ‘If you focus this much energy on making more money, you’d be flying first class.’ 

It’s also important to note that this hack is definitely frowned upon by Ryanair, and surely would be by all other commercial airlines as well. 

One viewer claiming to be a product owner for Ryanair commented: ‘I just created a ticket to prevent such behavior. Thanks for reporting!’