I just landed in SPC - booked via BA.com LHR-MAD-SPC, same issue getting seats on MAD-SPC, tried the PNR on iberia.com to no avail, called BA Gold line, they allocated us to the exit row 14C and 14D, which given the appalling legroom on IB Express, I was grateful for. This showed up immediately in my app, but when we checked in last night, we had been pushed back to our original seats, even though KVS showed our exit row seats were untaken. This morning at LHR F counter, she tried again to get us into those seats and said they seemed to be taken or otherwise unavailable, so we got 4B and 4C. Needless to say, the guy in front of me just had to put his seat back the entire flight.

And to make things worse, our original two seats were empty! But the woman in 14B had by then moved to 14C and fallen asleep, and the crew had already ignored us during drink service and later did so again when handing out snacks (probably because I was submerged under half the divider curtain with J!) that I doubted we would have any joy asking to move.

Having had absolutely terrible experiences with service recovery on IB before, I doubt I will get very far complaining about either the shoddy on board service or denying us a seat allocation for no apparent reason. Before anyone says "load and balance", the flight was almost entirely full - apart from those exit seats and a few down the back.