Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
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.
Originally Posted by
findark
I have also never had my seat assignment changed, except for that time when they lost everyone's assignments systemwide on the 3-class 777s (also not including frame swaps with changes are unavoidable, like 77H -> 77G back when both were flying). In my case I would imagine it's because I am almost always in the premium cabin on a window, so not a FAM or reaccommodation target.
I don't know, my wife and I must have started flying United at the wrong time. We started in 2016. Since early 2018, for every one of our international long hauls we have had seats changed, planes swapped, whatever but it has been extremely stressful. And I think this will continue for a while as we fly out of ORD......on 772s.......
Prior to that, we flew for 34 years on US Airways and BA and we had never had a seat assignment changed except for the few occasions where we missed our flight on US Airways or the OpUps that BA liberally bestowed on us (before the computer took over, we were getting OpUps on 50% of our flights).