Originally Posted by
rustykettel
Inaugurals, particularly from a new airport, sell out. If you don't book when it's first available you may not be going at all.
I suspect this is the reason. With the PDX flight becoming the inaugural instead of LAS, I bet there were people moving over or others getting on leaving late callers without a seat. If the flights are completely empty and blocked now, AS may be trying to figure out how to handle it rather than just leave it up to first come first served.
I think missamo80's expectations and frustration are both valid here. He booked himself on the inaugural flight before it sold out. It seems like Alaska set up a new inaugural flight for 3/4, and started moving folks from the original 2/11 inaugural flight onto the new one, keeping it blocked out so it would go to those customers instead of new ones. (This worked correctly for me.) There is also a flight a bit earlier in the day PAE-PDX, which isn't open to revenue customers. The person who rebooked him, asked which of the two he wanted to be on, and of course he said the earlier one. Now everyone on that PDX flight has been moved off, making it again unavailable to revenue customers. But instead of moving him back onto the true inaugural, they moved him to an SEA flight, and now he's locked out of the PAE party, as if he hadn't been one of the first to book on the day the inaugural went on sale.
Hopefully he'll be able to get in touch with someone at the airline who can look at the whole history and see that he's one of the folks that the new 3/4 PAE-LAS flight is blocked out
for.