No online seat reservation after starting first segment of a return trip with luggage
I had a flight STR-TXL on May 31, returning on Jun 1, booked with airberlin. One piece of luggage, online check-in the day before. For some reason, I did not have a seat reservation for the return flight, so I tried to fix that while waiting at the gate for the flight to TXL.
The airberlin web site showed a free seat 2C and allowed me to select it. However, when confirming the selection, I got a funny message: apparently, if at least one passenger on a booking has already checked in with luggage, I cannot make a seat reservation for the return flight (for which I was not checked in yet at that point) anymore.
airberlin cannot explain this - ticketing and the hotline are without clue, and I have also never noticed this effect with other airlines.
This does not happen too often to me, as I usually have seats assigned within the booking process already, so I can't really tell, but I am curious: is that a new rule? Is that airberlin-specific? Or did I just run into a funny programming bug on their web portal?
Well, next time, I'll check before delivering luggage :-)
Thanks for your feedback!
Cheers,
--j.