Originally Posted by Mauricio23

The issue is not "not getting the same seat" - most people would understand that an exact mapping is not possible, especially if two flights have been merged. The gripe is with moving people who paid for a preferred seat to a non-preferred one when preferred seats are available. What would it take to fix it, two lines of code? It's just one more instance of IT incompetence in full display.

It gets worse: when you are moved to a non-preferred seat, your preferred seat fee is refunded. Now, suppose you put yourself back in a preferred seat and pay again. If, God forbid, you were to again be moved to a non-preferred seat, your fee would no longer refunded automatically, because AC's systems cannot distinguish between the first and the second time you were bumped from a preferred seat. When this happened to me, it took six months and direct intervention from Ben L. to fix it (as apparently refund services also has a hard time understanding that you can be bumped from a preferred seat twice).