StuckinITH

I seem to recall that you fly often to Asia where it's quite common for passengers on those flights not to choose their seats until they check-in and many do it at the airport.

On our flight to PVG in May where we had 4 plane types in the last 72 hours we managed to get extremely good seats at swaps #1 and #2 that happened at T-60 and T-48. I also improved my seat at check-in. Then at T-5, our luck turned sour.... In the First Class area, my wife had 2A and I had 2C. Very good seats, across the aisle from each other. Swapped to the pmCO. 2A remained as 2A. Just behind the toilet so noises.....and window with having to jump over the passenger in 2B. Not good. My seat 2C became 2D. At least it was an aisle seat but still too close to that toilet. Swap happened just when we had finished boarding our first flight and I had to close my phone. When we landed in ORD, we managed to switch to 3D and 4D. In a perfect world, we would have gotten seats xD and xE next to each other but there were no E seats left at that time. However, if we look at the glass being half full, we were more lucky than the couple who had 1C and 1H in the pmUA772 and got 1D and 1E in the pmCO 772...... And my wife did get a good ETC after she wrote to the 1K line. But we have no way to know how much of the ETC was due to the fact that the United agents at our home airport cannot through check luggage for UA-UA flights on different PNRs which was the second thing she complained about. In 40 years of flying as an adult, this is only the third time that she writes to complain to an airline which shows that she was really annoyed........