I upgraded a flight from WT to WT+ with a cash option. Subsequently when on MMB I could see that I appeared to have a seat assigned. Since there was nothing better available in WT+ I was happy to stay there. Key point here is that I never assigned myself a seat, I just accepted the allocation that I saw.

A day or so later I noticed that I had moved to a 'worse' seat (still WT+), and called the Gold desk to politely whinge in the hope of getting moved back. I know and respect that they can move me around as they wish (and that whinging too hard could see me mysteriously OpDowned ).

The curious result of this is that they told me no seat had been previously assigned, and were mystified as to why I thought I had a prior seat allocation at all .

As if to confirm their statement I now see that on the summary screen of MMB it says something like 'Seat 1A assigned', which was not there before as I had to go into 'assign seats' to see my old 'allocation'.

So it seems as if the seat allocation map was showing a phantom allocation. Passenger number 1 (me) clearly in a seat on the web, but no record of that on the BA side.

Does anyone know what was going on?

And for those that like a happy ending: Losing the decent WT+ seat became moot when I was bumped to CW .