Traveling CLT-HNL today as a party of 4 in First (I'm on a comp UG, upgraded rest of the family months ago with SWUs). Everybody's checked in last night, we got boarding passes at CLT this morning and headed to the lounge.
When we get to the gate ~25 minutes before departure, passengers are still boarding but when we scan our boarding passes, they've given all four of our seats away to nonrevs. Tried to talk to the gate agents, they said they paged our names after all F passengers boarded and thought we weren't coming
Obviously, boarding passes indicate that boarding ends 15 minutes prior. GAs said our only option was to downgrade if we wanted to get on the flight, and assigned us random seats in the PE cabin.
Thoughts on if this is considered an involuntary downgrade? Am I due a refund of the SWUs? Any other compensation?