Ryanair Family Seat Charge Under CMA Investigation for Consumer Law Compliance

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a formal investigation into the Ryanair family seat charge, examining whether requiring parents to pay a reservation fee to sit beside their children complies with consumer law. The watchdog said it will determine whether the practice is ‘in line with consumer law’.

The CMA is the UK’s competition and consumer watchdog, a body with the power to investigate businesses and, if it finds a breach, take enforcement action. It is an independent non-ministerial Government department, funded by the Treasury.

How the Ryanair Family Seat Charge Works

Under Ryanair‘s current policy, parents travelling with children aged between two and 11 must pay to reserve what the airline calls a mandatory family seat. Once that adult seat is paid for, children are then allocated seats next to or near their parent free of charge. Children under two must sit on a parent’s lap. The CMA said the fee for a mandatory family seat is typically about £8 each way. For all other passengers, paying to reserve a specific seat is optional.

The CMA said Ryanair is ‘the only major airline flying out of the UK to impose this charge’. Other carriers, the watchdog noted, either offer to seat children beside a parent without requiring a paid adult reservation, or automatically allocate seats together at the point of booking.

Two Separate Concerns Driving the Investigation

The CMA’s investigation focuses on two distinct questions. The first is whether the mandatory family seat fee amounts to charging parents for the airline to meet its child safety and disability-related obligations as set out under aviation rules. In other words, the watchdog wants to know whether a fee is being applied to something that is, in effect, a legal requirement rather than a genuine optional extra.

The second concern is drip pricing. This is when a business does not present customers with all unavoidable charges upfront, instead adding them partway through the booking process, so the total cost only becomes clear once a customer is already committed. The investigation will examine whether the Ryanair family seat charge is presented to families in this way.

Hayley Fletcher, senior director of consumer protection at the CMA, said: ‘Lots of families save up to afford a summer holiday and we know that extra charges can quickly bump up the price.’ She added: ‘For the past year, we’ve told businesses to ensure their customers are shown the total price upfront, those who don’t face the very real possibility of action from the CMA.’

The CMA was careful to note it has ‘reached no conclusions about whether Ryanair has broken the law’, stressing it is at the beginning of its investigation.

Ryanair Rejects the Investigation as ‘Bogus’

Ryanair responded sharply. In a statement, the airline said its ‘family seating policy fully complies with all relevant laws and regulations, and saves families money when travelling on the UK’s lowest fare airline’. It argued it ‘does not charge any fee for children to sit beside their parent’, and that ‘parents travelling with children pay for only one (adult) reserved seat’.

The airline also turned the criticism political. It described the investigation as ‘a failed effort by the Starmer Government to pretend it cares about consumers when it has failed to abolish APD’, referring to air passenger duty, a government levy on flights. Ryanair said abolishing the charge ‘would immediately deliver lower fares for all consumers and growth for the UK aviation, tourism and wider economy’. The airline said it ‘looks forward to disproving these false CMA claims’.

Consumer advocates took a different view. Rory Boland, editor of consumer magazine Which? Travel, said: ‘Ryanair doesn’t have to wait for the outcome of the CMA’s investigation. It could stop charging these unreasonable fees today and we would encourage them to do that.’

The CMA has not set a deadline for the conclusion of its investigation, but under its rules it would need to issue a formal decision before taking any enforcement action.