weero

It's now official that LH seat blocking only works for some of the super elites on
this board .

After two lengthy calls about travel reservation with LH Australia and LH Switzerland,
I was finally able to get a final statement from a supervisor: "there is no such
thing as seat blocking on LH, it is not implemented and it has never been
available. Maybe on the day of departure, the seat next to a HON would be
filled last but it's not promised or guaranteed" .
I called repeatedly as the Oz agent claimed that it would no exist, and the
senior Swiss agent said she never heard of it but would ask. So she did and
this was the reply .

This simply perpetuates my long year experience with seat blocking not working.
And it struck me as I was not prepared for such a clear answer which might
be technically incorrect but successfully defends it's on existence. It seems
that only LH Germany (maybe US, maybe the HON line?) can trigger this process?

To those of you who get it working - any specfic call centre you are using
to have it activated?

f0zzyNUE

hi,

i experienced "broken" seat-blocking only one time. i was on a partnerpplus-benefit award ticket (not connected to my SEN-number). i checked in by telephone and after receiving a seat number i asked the call center agent to add my ff-number.
the boarding pass i got for the flight didnot include my status, the plane was half empty and even some completely empty rows available. but i was sitting at a window seat, middle and aisle seat occupied with a very fat guy on the middle seat
on my return trip (two segments) planes were filled up quite well (85%), SEN was printed on my BP and i had a free, unoccoupied neighbour seat twice :-)

my guess is that it is a "soft feature" (not communicated in any way), but checkin-procedures try to keep seats unoccupied close to status passengers.
so if you check in eary AND your ticket contains your SEN-number it could work. at least it does for me as i always checkin as soon as possible (by phone, wap or web-checkin) and my FF-number is always linked to my ticket.

CHris

btw, in exit row seats i never expect seat blocking to work (and it has never)

larsll

It does work. I believe it is part of the seating algorithm that pre-assigns seats before check-in is opened. I don't think it is something that someone at a call-center deals with. Either the system sorts you out, or you are out of luck. What I have seen on several commuter flights is that it even seats the same people next to each other several weeks in a row (possibly alphabetically sorted), all SENs behind the curtain, middle seats blocked.

mag

it has never worked for me. i have never had the feeling, "nice, the seat next to me was obviously blocked".
on numerous flights, there was even sb sitting next to me despite the cabin being almost empty.

i have followed the discussion on this topic here to look for an explanation, but now i guess weero found it...

ierax

For me it works quite good. Approx. 60% of my flights are with an empty middle seat next to me. Many check-in agents told me that the seat is automatically blocked by the system. But of course there are flights where the aircraft is half full and the middle seat is occupied

weero

Check-in in SIN or ZRH don't know about it either.
"not communicated in any way" and larsil's experiences -> it is a myth.
So what about all these seat maps some elites have seen where the seat next to
them is dashed out or has a * on it?
Which agents? I am still looking for an agent who actually ever heard the
term 'seat blocking'
My experience is on mag's side - it never worked for me .
Only on the few occasions when I travelled on LH as a 1K...

Rambuster

my experience is hit or miss. I have been on flights (in Y) where the only vacant seat was the one next to me on the entire plane and alternatively I have been on flights where the plane was nearly empty but I still had some guy in the middle seat next to me !?

I would say 50%/50% chance so far.

SenAOI

I've got the same impression. IMO there is no real logic in this system. As I have been told, the final seat plannings are made in South Africa and the people there don't care that much about status. So it has happend to me sometimes that the C-class on small planes like Dash 8-400 oder Canadair Jet is crowded with four people in every row and a lot of free seats behind the curtain. LH promises to improve but the results are a little poor.
Salve Luigi

roundtheworld

Actually it exists and it seems to work. (Or did) Afew year ago we were flying C and he gave us three seats with the middle on blocked. The check in agent specifically said I will block the middle seat.

H eexplained that technically it is not taken, but its taken out of the automatic assignment system, so the only way to get it was to have a agent go in the seat map and mannually put it in. But then the agent would see a SEN or HON sitting next to it.

Buster CT1K

When I have flown LH F, I have often asked the seat next to me be blocked at check-in and the request is either confirmed (no problem) or denied (sorry, full flight) on the spot.

However, my last LH F flight was a few years ago.

weero

What aboutthe check-in agents in bella Italia? Are they familiar with the concept? Or do they put on their "are you talking Martian to me?" antics?
So it did at least exist. Was this ex. US or ex. DE? And do they still offer it to you
in your HON years?

ulev

The best way to put this is: LH wants it to exist and they put an incredible amount of effort in it to make it work. However in reality it seems to work less and less. The way it is supposed to work: as soon as a SEN or HON is assigned a seat, the adjacent seat is flaged by the system. Of course, this seat has to be empty at that time.

No agent can manually set this flag, but they can easily ignore it when they assign seats to other passengers manually. An automatic seat assignment by the system should always respect the flag. However, there seem to be many ways to override this process even by the various check in systems.

BTW, there is also a real hard block for seats. This is used for several reasons (i.e. a broken seat) and can be lifted by the flight manager only.

Kiwi Flyer

I've usually had seat blocking by check in as a mere SEN, without any prompting. From various airports around the world (yup even SIN).

weero

Yes, I am - painfully - aware of this. The Flymaster even gets it every single
time. But what I wonder about in this thread is less the experimental and anectodical
evidence than the mere fact or factoid if it does officially exist. Having the
word from an LH supervisor now makes me doubt a feature I took
for granted - though not properly working - all the time.
So it's an automatism rather than something offered by the elite agents.
Which makes sense for what I tried: reserved seat 6D and 6G next to it went
to 'taken' on the ExperFlyer seat map.
That could explain for a few phenomena...

Deimos

I have often seen that the seat next to my preassigned seat is shown as occupied on expertflyer and free on checkmytrip.com (or is it the other way around?). This to me is evidence that seat blocking really does exist. I have also several times had the seat blocking fail such that the seat next to me is taken by another passenger despite there being plenty of seats available in the rest of the cabin. I think that this confirms the discussion so far in the thread that the seat blocking feature exists in the system but that clueless agents tend to ignore it. Another example of how LH only cares about their frequent flyers in theory but not in practice.