TAM sells seats that don't exist--literally!
Yesterday I was on a flight between Sao Paolo and Porto Alegre on TAM as the last leg from a longer transcontinental flight. I had a boarding pass originally issued for seat 20E, but at the Sao Paolo airport at re-check in they issued me a new seat, this time 27D. Well, I wasn't about to complain, losing a middle seat for an aisle seat.
Only problem was, there was no row 27. Or 25, 26, 28 and well, you get the picture. The back end of the galley area started to fill up with passengers bearing boarding passes that corresponded to seats that simply didn't exist-- at least a dozen of us. I asked a FA if they had switched out the usual aircraft for the flight--nope, it was the usual plane!
After a series of phone calls by the FAs to try to see what options we had, they resettled a few of us in the remaining empty seats, and then apparently held an auction on the plane to see who was willing to get bumped. (I say apparently because the entire transaction was in rapid-fire and agitated Portuguese, which was far beyond my simple "Bom dia" ability to follow.)
In the end, all but four of us were resettled. Really strange, though. Is it really possible that TAM doesn't know how many rows they have on a flight the run a couple times a day?