I had been assigned aisle seats for an upcoming flight due to the lack of availability of window seats. The day before my departure, I visited united.com and proceeded to go through the mock steps of purchasing a ticket on the flight I was booked on just to use the "select seat" option to view empty and occupied seats.

I found that the seat I was assigned was appearing as available. I also saw that the window seat I would have liked (8A) was appearing as occupied.

I called res anyway to request a seat change. The agent was able to give me the window seat (8A) which according to the seat map was already occupied.

Is the seat map feature on united.com reliable?

koppelman