hazelrah

I have an upcoming award trip that I have booked in First Class. On both the Out-bound and In-bound, I selected and confirmed an aisle seat.

Inexplicably this past weekend, I found that somehow my aisle seat had been changed to a window. Anyone have any ideas how this could hapen?

belynch

Dollars to dougnuts it's a FAM.

Out of US' control.

me4yankees

FAM or QIK!

Travels2mch

Same thing happened to me, booked last August and had my coveted 3C....day of first segment found out I had been moved to 2F. Then the debacle on March 11 came and I missed the connection altogether and ended up in 19B. I wrote to them 3 weeks ago asking for a credit of miles, no response yet.

hsh101

I also had my seat change today, for a flight I'm taking tomorrow. Mine wasn't FAM, though, at least that's what I'm guessing. I was in 3F when my upgrade cleared yesterday... but when I did OLCI today, I was moved to 3D. 3F was still open, so I moved right back to it.

For me, I think it may be because my pref lists aisle - but lately, I've wanted window seats, so that I can avoid someone crawling over me when my laptop is open and I'm hard at work in my seat. When the upgrade cleared, all the aisle seats were taken, but it looks like 3D opened up since then.

warbo

One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that seat assignments are merely requests. Even if seats are assigned, there may be a schedule/aircraft change which means seat assignments have to be altered. Usually, the seats assigned at time of booking are honoured, but there's no way this can be guaranteed - they may be changed/cancelled for operational reasons. No airline will guarantee that you will be in a particular seat.

sbtinme

warbo -- yes, we agree with you. But there should be no reason for pax with seat assignments to find that their seats changed when there were no other changes to the flights booked. (i.e. if the flight number stayed the same, the aircraft type is the same, etc, one shouldn't be surprised to learn that the seats requested have been lost or changed.)

Admittedly, this happens rarely, but when it does, it can be very frustrating.

etch5895

So how does this work with regards to the European LCCs like Air Berlin or TUIfly where you can 'buy' your seat assignment for a couple of Euros? I'd be a little upset if I paid extra for a seat assignment only to have it unceremoniously ripped away from me (doubtful the airline would be too worried about processing a refund, either)

hazelrah

Thanks much to all who responded with all the good information. I am assuming it is FAM; I did go back into the seatmap and my formerly assiged seat had been taken.

One thing I did notice is that my profile for seating was marked "no preferrence". I did go into my profile and change this to "aisle".

mrhotelman

One thing that can affect seat assignments (I just recently found this out) is how your reservation is booked. In many cases a travel agent, corporate travel dept, etc. has "seating requests" that get entered into most airline reservations they created. As a result, even though you might select a specific seat, the system does a sweep and when it sees the seating request from the travel agent, it in many cases will change your seat assignment. Most of my travel is booked via a corp travel dept and I seemed to have this problem fairly often on most airlines. Nobody was able to tell me why, until a UA reservation agent looked into the problem and explained to me what was going on. Now I know to call my corp travel dept and have them delete out any seating requests. The problem hasnt occured since.

This may not be the reason for why your problem occured, but its a possibility.