We all have our preferred seat on a plane.

When it comes to booking a flight, there’s more to think about than simply which flight you’d like to get on. For many of us, there’s a big decision that needs to be made: do you pay extra to choose your seat or risk the random seat allocation?

Some airlines will let you choose a seat free of charge, but on budget flights, you’ll be charged for this service, so most people will choose to be assigned a seat. But this comes with one major issue – you’ll be at risk of landing a middle seat.

There aren’t many of us who actually want the middle seat, especially if we’re travelling alone. However, this also means that anyone who does pay to book a seat is likely going to pick an aisle or window seat, making it even more likely that those assigned a seat will get a middle one as they’re the only seats left.

Worry not, though, because one travel guru and frequent flier has come up with a “genius” way to make sure you never get assigned a middle seat. His method has been going viral since he shared it on TikTok, and has been hailed a “game-changer”.

Jorden Tually explained that on budget airlines, when you choose random seat allocation, they will “intentionally put you in the middle seat” in the hope that you will then agree to pay money to avoid it.

Unwilling to pay $9 AUD (£4.50) to upgrade to a window seat, Jorden shared his genius hack to make sure he’d be assigned a better seat – by making the airline think there were no middle seats available.

He said: “Upon check-in I saw there were still 10 middle seats available, so I go straight to the website and pretend to buy 10 more tickets. The website is going to ask for every passenger’s names, so just slam a bunch of letters in and continue on.

“Next, go to seat selection and select all of the middle seats or all of the seats you definitely do not want to be sitting in. Then click continue. When you do this, the system will hold those seats for about 10-15 minutes, and that’s when you book yours.

“When you go to check in with your authentic ticket, you can see that there are no more middle seats so you can click that random seat allocation. It only took me two minutes, and now I have a window seat.”

It’s important to note that if you try this method, you should not go any further with the middle seat tickets as you don’t want to accidentally pay for multiple plane tickets that you aren’t going to use. You can close the page once you’ve selected your seats and hit continue without entering any payment information.

In the caption of Jorden’s video, he claimed the hack had saved him from “many a middle seat” over the years and that it had “never failed” him in all the times he’s tried it. He added: “It’s easiest when done on a computer and even easier if you do it closer to check-in as less seats are available.”

Commenters on the post were split, however, as while some said the hack was “brilliant”, others said it seemed like a lot of effort to save a small amount of money.

One person said: “How did I never think of this? I love it!” But another argued: “I’d rather pay. This wastes lots of time and my time is worth more than money.”