Go on - reserve that seat

Ryanair, the world’s favourite airline (it says), has introduced reserved seating.

The pre-booked service, which became available on all routes on January 10, costs €10 (each way) and includes priority boarding.

You can still pre-book priority boarding for €5 each way per passenger (which apparently is limited to 90 passengers per flight – bet you didn’t know that).

The last available full-year figures (to March 2011) showed the airline carried 72.1 million passengers. Its figures to March this year will undoubtedly be lower as Ryanair grounded 80 planes over the winter, so let’s say there’s a 5% drop – that’s still 68.5 million people carried to the year ending March 2012.

Based on my experiences of both Ryanair and easyjet, I would say around 15% of passengers currently book priority boarding – some 10.27 million people.

Let’s surmise that 50% of those will go for the new reserved seating/ priority boarding option – and we get to the grand total of €51.38 million extra profit a year.

This new development is no great surprise to an old traveller like what I am.

Michael O will undoubtedly have a long list of more wheezes to extract more dosh from punters.

Next? Forget the €1 to go to the loo – people would just train themselves to avoid using the onboard facilities.

But my money is on a fee for carry-on bags. Over the last couple of years I have seen many, many occasions when, on a full flight, overhead space simply runs out and some bags end up in the hold.

So, look out for the combined €15 each way fee for reserved seat, priority boarding and space for your trolley-dolley bag.

You heard it here first.