Originally Posted by
LegalTender
Originally Posted by
Poker2012chu
2) ~95% chance you won't have trouble keeping your seat if you board late provided some other passenger doesn't decide to snatch it from you before you get on (see my write up on seat poaching below).
How does this drama "happen all the time" with
such a small incident percentage?
Check your math.
95% would mean 1 out of every 20 boardings (and thus 1 out of every 10 roundtrips, or even 1 out of every 5 roundtrips with a connection in each direction)! That's awful!
(That's why any company which tells you their product is so reliable because it works 99% of the time, that's hogwash meant only to impress the math-averse. Internet which is 99% reliable would still include being down about a third of a day each month.
)
I've done many hundreds (if not a thousand or more) of boardings on AA and AS over the past couple decades with
never this happening (that wasn't instantly resolved, as in someone had just misunderstood which seat was theirs), but then I virtually always have exit rows reserved (I have enough status to get those free at booking time, and I only book flights which have them available).
If something like that happened to be on 1 out every 20 flights I was on, I would say the seat assignment system was totally broken!