Originally Posted by
awu25
FC seats show up as open on the seat map when FC passengers have not selected their seat. As suggested, you need to look at the upgrade tab to get an accurate view of how many FC seats are available.
Sometimes if the gate agents are in a rush, and some FC passengers do not show, they do not process the upgrade list in order to get the flight out in time.
If you care, write in to customer care (and potentially get a BS response like I did about how R space needs to be available) and maybe they'll throw you something
I did look at the Upgrade tab in the terminal up until boarding, and the front cabin was shown as fully booked, and with all seats selected.
Your scenario of no-shows is the most plausible. I guess it's not shenanigans to leave these seats empty, but there was time to deal with this, as we left early.
It seems a shame to have a 319 go out with a quarter of the front cabin empty when there were at least a dozen people on the upgrade list, but I'm not sure whether it's worth writing in to United about this. Would this have any chance of making future practices more CPU friendly?