easyJet removes passengers from flight who had not paid extra for advanced seat selection

Exclusive: ‘All speedy boarders were allowed on without question,’ said one of the passengers denied boarding on a flight to Inverness

After a dozen passengers were told at the departure gate they would not fly from Luton to Inverness, The Independent has learned that only travellers who had not paid extra for advance seat selection were offloaded.

The intended aircraft operating easyJet flight 153 on Sunday 19 August was replaced by a smaller plane.

Airlines are obliged under European air passengers’ rights rules to offer inducements in a bid to persuade volunteers to take a later flight. Ground staff at Luton, which is easyJet’s base, offered £150, but only six people came forward.

With the airline obliged to pay €250 (£224) to everyone it offloaded, easyJet could have raised the offer by 50 per cent without adding to its costs. But instead 12 passengers were selected because they had declined to pay up to £15 for advance seat selection.

One of the passengers denied boarding was Professor David Southall, who was on the final leg of a journey from the medical charity he runs in Liberia.

“All ‘speedy boarders’ were allowed on without question,” he told The Independent.

“When it came to selection of who would be turned away, there was no humanity in the decision-making. In particular there was a lady who was supposed to be attending her grandchild’s christening that afternoon and she was refused.”

It later emerged that another passenger, seeing the lady’s distress, offered to give up her seat so that the grandmother could attend the christening. But a supervisor said it could not be done in the time available.

The airline’s policy is to offload the last people to check in, except for those who have paid for a specific seat. Earlier this month, a student travelling from Stansted to Sardinia was turned away so that a passenger whose seat was broken could sit in her assigned place.

The only circumstances in which a passengers who paid extra for a seat would ever be offloaded would be to allow a special assistance passenger to travel.

Professor Southall criticised the policy, and said no attempt was made to assess the urgency of travellers’ plans: “If they had started investigating this before the gate they could easily have identified those with a pressing need to travel.”

“This is not just an inconvenience but a minor tragedy and surely there should be much more thought put in by easyJet into who is removed from a flight because of aircraft problems?

“The rich speedy boarders should not take precedence over this poor lady.”

A spokesperson for the airline said: “easyJet can confirm that as a result of an aircraft downgrade from a larger A320 to a smaller A319, a number of passengers were unable to travel on flight EZY153 from Luton to Inverness on 19 August.”

“We would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused. We offered all passengers who were unable to travel alternative transport on other easyJet flights to Inverness on the same day.”

“We are investigating why passengers who volunteered were wrongly advised about the level of compensation they are entitled to. Our customer service team are contacting all affected passengers to ensure their compensation is processed correctly.

“Our processes to follow in these cases are very clear and we have addressed this with the staff involved.”