Woman shares risky trick for never ending up in the middle seat in a flight

A travel guru has claimed they have a sneaky way to gain extra room and avoid the middle seat. But are you brave enough to book seats for your group, intentionally leaving a hole in your travel plans?

TikTok travel expert Janelle says you should never book seats next to your travel partner.

Instead she always chooses both aisle and window, leaving the middle seat empty.

The gamble is that nobody in their right mind will choose to sit in an middle seat. Especially one flanked by strangers. More often than not they are left the middle seat to themselves.

"No one wants the middle seat, absolutely no one," she said, in a video on her TikTok channel @janelleonajet.

"If there's an aisle seat open, 100 out of 100 times, that person is going to pick the aisle seat over the middle seat."

The creative video on seat allocation and game theory has won praise from over half a million viewers.

Not everyone was in favour of the 'high-risk, high-reward' seat hijinks. On especially busy flights, airlines are likely to allocate the seat to solo travellers.

Viewers said Janelle was "rolling the dice" on their flights. One of these days she and her beau would be the awkward bread on a stranger sandwich, they warned.

Not so!

As a self-proclaimed "travel expert" Janelle is always thinking two moves ahead.
"Let's say they do seat someone in your middle seat. You have the option to trade with them because absolutely no one wants to sit in the middle seat.

"You could offer to trade for your aisle or window seats. They will say yes and then you can still sit next to each other."

The odds that another passenger would be stubborn enough to insist on their original seat and not trade are pretty slim.

Other passengers were already converts. In some cases they had been gaming seat allocation for decades.

One recent convert wrote: "I've been doing this! IT WORKS SO WELL!"

Many praised the "shogun-level strategy" in the travel hack.

"Great advice. You're rolling the dice on a better outcome and if it falls through, nothing lost."

"My mum and I have been doing this for at least 10 years now," wrote a third.

This article was first published by the NZ Herald and is republished here with permission.