Hackers Exchange Tips For Getting That Seat Upgrade For Free

Few things are better than getting ready to board a flight and getting told that you’ve been selected for an upgrade.

While getting more leg space is a marked improvement on the travel experience, few are willing to spend what in some cases can amount to double the price of the flight ticket in order to move to premium economy.

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As a result, various “hacks” and “tricks” for getting that extra leg space free of charge have been resurfacing online as the average price of a plane ticket rose by nearly 25% between 2022 and 2023.

The ‘Middle Seat Trick’ Is Becoming Less and Less Reliable

A strategy that travelers have been trying for years to varying degrees of success is the “middle seat trick” — when checking in online, two people traveling together will each select the aisle and window seats in a three-seat row and hope that the middle seat remains open.

Particularly on less crowded flights, the strategy will occasionally work and leave the travelers with the extra room and leg space. But in 2023, it has become less and less reliable as a staffing shortage pushes airlines to maximize their routes and have planes flying with as few empty seats as possible.

A more complex “travel hack” making the internet rounds involves two travelers booking the aisle seats in front of each other on a three-by-three plane configuration. 

While only available on large flights with three aisles of seats, this booking strategy makes it more likely that a middle seat will remain empty as three seats are less likely to be selected together. If the flight is full and the middle seat is claimed, it ensures that you have the extra aisle seat leg space while still remaining a seat away from your traveling companion.

“The idea is that the remaining two seats of the middle section will be booked by people traveling together,” a Reddit user going under the Professional-sir-92 wrote in the R/TravelHacks community. “When the person in the middle needs to get up, they will in all likelihood crawl over their traveling companion instead of you. Bonus if the middle seat remains empty.”

‘Bonus If The Middle Seat Remains Empty’

The suggestion was given to a traveler who plans to fly to Venice from the United States and “cannot afford to upgrade our seats to premium.” Many of the responders swore by this or that strategy to maximize the chances of getting an empty middle seat and extra leg space.

But what some see as clever “travel tricks” are also incredibly common and bound to elicit some annoyance from fellow travelers — those who get the last middle seat on a booked flight often sense that their travel companions had hoped they wouldn’t show up. Many also debated the ethics of not booking the seats you really want and then expecting the person who comes along to switch seats or accommodate you in some other way.

“The few times I’ve been the middle person, the couple stayed in their respective seats but talked, argued, and passed things over me,” one travel blogger wrote on Twitter in response to a Washington Post reporter’s question on how often travelers did this. “If you’re going to stay in the seats you chose, you need to pretend like you don’t know each other.”

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