raehl311

Yes, they do. It's called picking an aisle seat for one person on the PNR and a window seat for the other person on the PNR.

United's policy is to allow people to pick the seats they want to sit in on a first-come, first-served basis. It is completely normal for a passenger to NOT want to sit in the middle seat and select an aisle or window seat until there is nothing other than middle seats left.

Nothing about this changes because two passengers happen to be on the same PNR. If the aisle and window seats are available when they select their seats, they're allowed to pick aisle and window seats, and the result for the person who books their ticket later when only middle seats are left is exactly the same - they were later in the first-come, first-served process.

Try looking at it from the end result:

Option 1: Pair of passengers chooses Aisle-Window. When all the aisle/window seats are full, everyone choosing their seat after that gets middle seats. If the middle seat ends up filled, pair switches seats so that someone who chose their seat AFTER them gets a aisle/window instead of a middle.

Option 2: Pair of passengers chooses Aisle-Middle. One other passenger who chooses their seats later gets a window seat who would have been in a middle seat, and everyone else after that gets a middle seat.

End result, either way, someone who is LOWER on the first-come/first-serve queue gets a non-middle seat.

And if you STILL want to insist this isn't fair to single travelers, single travelers can do the exact same thing: When choosing your seat, choose an aisle/window in a row where the other aisle/window is already occupied, and you can play the same "hope no one sits in this middle seat" lottery everyone else is.

Or, you can pick an empty row, and hope a couple doesn't grab the other two seats in the row.

Or, if the flight is really empty, you can take a middle seat and hope you get the whole row to yourself!

And if you *STILL* feel somehow wronged by this, ask yourself: When you are choosing seats, if there is an empty row, and there are rows with only one seat available, do you choose a seat in the row with only one seat available, just in case a group of 3 booking after you wants to sit together? Of course you don't. You're picking the best seat for you.

Regardless, passengers can choose any available seat. There is no rule that bans them from aisle or window seats because their ticket is on a multi-ticket PNR.