Seat charges in addition to airfare

[Vaughn,Tao of the Travelle]

Having for over 50 years I've never experienced this practice by Royal Caribbean on our air from LAX to Rome. We were checking on our reservations and noticed that no seats had been assigned, upon further review we discovered that we had to pay additional for our seats even though our airfare had been fully paid through an Air to Sea RCCL agent.

No such disclosure was made during our booking and after multiple inquires through customer service of Royal Carribbean, no one has reached out, no offered any explanation.

Please if others have similar surprise seat charges, ours was $110, reach out, what was your experience. Did RCCL compensate you?

[Ampurp85]

Please be advised that if you booked through air2sea that's not Royal. They work with Royal but they aren't anything but a vendor. I have used air2sea twice. I made sure before I paid to get assigned seats. You will have to contact air2sea or the airline in regard to any charges.

[teddy]

Pretty sure this is on the airlines end. 
 

We fly Economy Class.  
 

Whether we book through Air2Sea or directly with an airline, we can either pay to get seats in advance or wait until our flight and be assigned.  Since we like to sit together, we pay for our individual seats ahead of time.

In our experience, it’s cheaper to do it this way rather than book a more expensive class that includes choosing a seat in the total cost. 

For our upcoming flights to/from Italy, we priced them out many different ways.  Air2Sea was the cheapest overall, but since we booked Economy (rather than Business, Plus, extra, etc depending on the airline), none of the ways we priced out included seats at the time of booking.  We paid extra to chose our seats after we paid in full.   If we had booked a higher class initially, we wouldn’t have had to pay a per seat charge.  

[smokeybandit]

That's the airline, not Air2Sea.

[Traveler]

Most of the airlines are asking for extra money for seat assignments, this is a major revenue engine for them. They do allow free assignments for elite members or you can assign it during check-in.

 

[bobroo]

I think it's Air2Sea. They are acting as a TA selling air travel.

In my opinion they are being a very poor travel agent. This is a real Costco maneuver. 

[teddy]

1 hour ago, bobroo said:

I think it's Air2Sea. They are acting as a TA selling air travel.

In my opinion they are being a very poor travel agent. This is a real Costco maneuver. 

We mostly fly American Airlines since they have a lot of flights out of Portland, Maine.  We’ve always had to pay for advance seat assignments when flying Basic Economy.   We’ve found the same thing the couple times we’ve flown on Delta.   

[ChessE4]

We flew roundtrip to Barcelona last fall and were able to select seat assignments once we were ticketed - no extra cost.  However, we opted to upgrade our seats and that cost either $$ or miles (United).  On the return, we didn't receive seat assignments until we got to the gate.  We are never able to get boarding passes on the cruise ship for return flights.

[Fuzzywuzzy]

We last booked Air2Sea flights through our travel agent. When we left her office that day we had a print out for both the flights, for 9 travellers, with the seat assignments on the paperwork.  Those were the seats that showed on our boarding passes a few months later. We were all economy fliers. Both United and Air Canada.

[bobroo]

I would expect a TA/Air2Sea to say something to the effect of  "I am selling you this bargain airfare, but in X amount of time you need to log in or call this airline and get your seat assignments. There will be an extra fee for this, it should be about $X." It should not be, we got their money on our part of the commissionable fare, we could care less what happens from here on out.

Also, I would also expect a TA to attempt to talk every full grown adult out of flying economy to Europe. It's a long time in the saddle.