I flew on UA853 SFO-NRT on 3/6 and I was sitting in 15H. 15G stayed empty until almost right before the doors closed, and at the last minute a gentleman got on and sat down next to me. He was a paid Business class passenger based in TPE and heading back home.

In any case, he tested out the seat and found that the recline didn't work. The cable was broken. So he informed an FA, who called the purser up... The purser asked what was wrong, the man explained it, and asked to be moved to another seat, and the purser said (rudely I must add...) that there was nowhere else to go, and she simply walked away.

The passenger then became a little bit irritated and in a huff, indicated that he wouldn't sit in a non-reclining seat for 10+ hours without being compensated. A mechanic then came on together with a ground supervisor, looked at the seat, and indicated that it would take 45 min. to fix, which was of course unacceptable to the ground supervisor.

Then the passenger said that he wanted to be compensated the difference between business and coach, which was clearly an unreasonable request. The ground supervisor indicated that he could have the difference refunded, but hé'd have to go sit in coach(!), which was an even more unreasonable answer.

The situation was clearly escalating. To diffuse the situation quickly, the passenger from 16G offered to switch seats, which the original passenger accepted, and the plane went on its way.

The passenger now in 15G was given a $100 voucher as compensation right before the flight.

Here are my comments and questions:

(1) What is the appropriate compensation in this situation? Personally, $100 voucher doesn't seem to cut it to me, but what do I know? I would have thought a segment upgrade or something might be in order, esp. to a paid C passenger.

(2) The passenger originally sitting in 15G was not amenable to calm discussion certainly, but the purser and the ground supervisor sucked in my opinion. They were rude, unsympathetic, and handled the situation VERY VERY poorly. I think they should be reprimanded. I know that UA lost at least one paid business class passenger thanks to this, and it certainly left all of us sitting around this incident with a bad impression.

(3) The guy who offered to switch gets a gold star in my opinion. UA should certainly have offered him more than $100 voucher, purely for moving their operation along so quickly (he laughed when they gave him his cert as he was also a paid C passenger who paid $5K for his ticket). I'm a nice guy and switch seats with almost anyone, but I wasn't about to sit in a non-reclining seat on SFO-NRT for 10h23 min without compensation after spending the night before at the craps tables in Vegas

Also, the original passenger in the broken was clearly not a very nice guy as I can't imagine that I would have stuck someone else with a non-reclining seat either... I would have probably just sucked it up and dealed if I were the original passenger in 15G, and dealt with customer relations later.

The final joke to this story is that the mechanic indicated that he was going to lock the seat upright for the flight but about 10 min. after takeoff it slid back into a permanent 120-degree recline and couldn't be brought up without an army of 3 FAs pushing on it. Idiots...