I was about to board a flight to Ibiza when I was stopped and told, ‘I’m sorry sir, you need to please step aside.’
It was 2017 and I was flying out with friends for a 30th birthday. We’d booked a stunning villa for three nights and it was set to be the perfect start to the summer.
Everything had gone off without a hitch until then.
My flatmates and I had made it to Stansted airport, checked in, been given boarding passes, and made it through security so all the anxiety-inducing moments before getting on a flight were out of the way.
But it turned out my flight had been overbooked and I was the lone passenger who wouldn’t be getting on the plane. My friends looked at me lost, no-one was really giving us a proper answer as to why or how the plane had been overbooked, and I was left behind while my pals jetted off to the party capital of the world without me.
I didn’t even know this was possible. Surely if you’ve paid good money for a plane ticket, you would expect to be on that plane?
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Apparently not – and it happens more often than you might realise.
What is check-in chicken?
Check-in chicken is the term used for the practice of waiting until the very last minute to check into a flight, in the hopes of being assigned a better, premium seat. The idea is that by waiting for the rest of the plane to fill in the standard seats, a check-in chicken player could hold out until the only available seats are those that others won’t have paid to upgrade to – like in an exit row with more legroom, or next to your travelling companion.
I was recently made aware of a travel trend known as check-in chicken, which is when you leave your check-in late with the hopes you’ll be allocated a better seat. In hindsight, I had been burned by unintentionally playing.
Sure, I’d checked in a few hours before my flight but – not only did I not get a better seat – I didn’t get a seat at all.
My friends had all checked in 24 hours before when it had opened. I was under the impression that as long as you check-in at least two hours before then you’re fine – you’ll at least get on the plane.
I had no idea there would be consequences for leaving it until the morning of departure and neither do so many others I’ve shared this story with.
With the next available flight not for another 24 hours, while my friends were sipping on Aperol Spritz by the pool, I was chain-smoking out of total boredom in the Stansted airport car park.
Those 24 hours waiting to board the next flight to Ibiza were truly miserable. Airport hotels were not designed for stays longer than a few hours to literally get into bed, scroll through Instagram for an hour and go to sleep before a flight.
When I finally made it to Ibiza, I’d missed more than a third of my holiday and didn’t arrive at our villa until 1am so I really had one night in Ibiza instead of three.
I was deflated and exhausted, and mainly spent the holiday frustrated, knowing that it was all ending in the blink of an eye. I can usually forget it, move on, and enjoy the moment but I just couldn’t shake the tension.
In the aftermath, nothing was really explained to me. It was weeks before I was guided to the right place to make a complaint and, even then, the compensation covered a night’s worth of accommodation and around £200 for the inconvenience.
Read the other side
‘I always play ‘check-in chicken’ on flights – it works a treat’, writes fellow Metro columnist Chelsea Dickenson.
‘I’ve done this countless times now and 90% of the time, I get brilliant seats. That’s how I ended up in 1C on a completely full flight from Krakow to London.
‘I didn’t pay a thing for my extra legroom in the first row seat, and my knees couldn’t have been happier.
‘Let me be clear: this is not for those who easily get stressed when travelling.But if you get it right, the payoff is real.’
Read more here
The whole experience left me livid.
Unfortunately, this is the danger of playing check-in chicken – even though I didn’t know I was even playing it at the time. And I’m not alone.
On a recent trip back from Bulgaria, someone else in my party who left it until the morning of departure to check-in was almost left stranded in the capital for a night because the airline told her they had overbooked our flight home by 20%. That’s about 50 tickets oversold for one flight, which is staggering to me.
How is that even legal? A music venue or sports stadium wouldn’t usually oversell tickets so why should an airline get away with it?
Thankfully, they made it onto the plane but had to endure the unnecessary stress of being told there was a good chance they would need to wait until the morning for another flight.
Apparently this practice is for our benefit.
Britain’s biggest budget airline, easyJet, said in 2023: ‘On any given day large numbers of passengers don’t show up for their flight. Filling our planes and minimising the number of empty seats we fly is one of the ways we can reduce the price you pay for your flight.’
Of course, I’m all for cheaper flights and environmentally-friendly initiatives, but this shouldn’t come at a cost to people’s holidays.
So for anyone tempted to try check-in chicken, not only would I strongly advise against it, I would check-in as soon as possible, always. Unless you don’t mind your holiday being cut short by a day or two.
Check-in chicken might have its perks, but be warned: It’s a gamble.
My experience at Stansted was enough to ensure that this is a trend I won’t be attempting or recommending to anyone else.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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