Originally Posted by
Khabibul35
She waited for confirmation, but in the end they did not put her on LIM-IAH-SFO. However, as she was about to board, apparently they issued her brand new boarding passes... 28F and 30C.
I find this a bit strange that they didn't mention this on the page where they ask about volunteering and I feel like offering United an opportunity to give away your seats to someone else shouldn't result in you needing to give up your seat if they don't end up doing so.
You're jumping to a conclusion here. While it is possible that she was moved around due to the VDB, that's extremely rare and requires the agent to have made several mistakes, since offloading the volunteer doesn't generally happen until they've actually begun the VDB process. (Generally, in a VDB situation, the new passenger gets the volunteer's seat).
The far more likely reason, in my opinion, is that seat assignments aren't guaranteed. There could have been an equipment swap that shuffled seats; there could have been a random UA IT glitch. She could have been moved by an overzealous gate agent (although I'm not sure why they'd move the seat on her connecting flight). Or, she could have been un-checked-in as part of the VDB pre-flight, which isn't supposed to affect the seats but sometimes does.
At the end of the day, she didn't need to get a Canadian transit visa and you were able to get her to the US, so I'd consider it a win for now and worry about better seats on the way back.
