<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by DFWRaider:
I would keep calling until you get someone that will switch the seats -- ask for a supervisor if you don't get anywhere with the reservation agent.
You bought these tickets with the understanding that your family would sit together in the seats you originally booked. AA should do something to fix this since they are the ones that caused the problem.</font>
But you are discounting the point of view of whomever else has been assigned the seats that this party now wants. Perhaps they bought their tickets after the equipment change, and explicitly requested those seats? I'm assuming that the desired seats have been assigned to another passenger, otherwise it would have been a simple matter to fulfill DebBrown's request.
Given that there are other passengers now assigned to those seats, are you suggesting that those passengers be moved? Wouldn't that put them in exactly the same position that DebBrown finds herself in?
I am sympathetic to DebBrown's situation, as I've found myself in exactly that situation on a couple of occasions. In one case, it was quite obvious why the change had been made: there was now a woman and small child in our assigned seats. I can understand why a gate agent would move passengers that had already checked in if adjacent seats were needed for a mother and small child that should not be separated. What I didn't agree with is that they picked two passengers on the same PNR and split them up - I would have thought that there would have been plenty of adjacent seats with unrelated passengers in them that could have been moved.
This brings me to another point: DebBrown, was your entire party on a single PNR, or were separate PNR's linked? That is, was there any way for AA to know that your party was traveling together?