Originally Posted by
jsloan
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.
Seat assignments may not be guaranteed, but in practice in 25 years and about a million miles on UA I just don’t recall a single instance where I didn’t get the seat I had selected at checkin time. Last minute equipment swaps are standard excuses, but even those are in my experience fairly rare, especially on international routes. And here we have seat changes on two flights. Much more likely, IMHO, that it
is related to the volunteering. Whether a human mistake or a process flaw I don’t know. It is unfortunate for the passenger (and some degree UA) that their first flight resulted in such a poor impression. Nowadays I often choose aisle seats for easier lav and walking access, but in my younger years I was glued to the window on virtually every flight..