Thank you both. Yes, it's more the abject failure of the telephone agents to tell the truth, or their supervisors to make any meaningful changes that rankles.

We booked the flights in Feb having no idea how insane the situation would be around now. We've flown to UK in times past in late June and it's been fine. But of course everything is different now.

We are absolutely stuck for the flight this evening, they maintain there are no PP seats left (but there are PP seats! Why I'm not on them when he promised I was, no one knows). The flight home they say there are PP seats but not together, and not in our fare price group. The first is an issue because it's my children we're flying with, the second I don't care about at all.

The people we speak to on the phone seem entirely unmoved that you work all year to afford these "luxuries" and then they renege on them with no consequence. It makes the customer service we used to get from BA (lacklustre at best) seem warm and fuzzy, lol.

We will see what happens this evening. I note yesterday's flights were up to 5 hours delayed, haha.

Thanks.

(And I should add - the ground staff at the gate were just superb. One lady was making announcements and the passengers would boo or shout back at her, then the pilot would saunter out and make an announcement and they'd all clap him. I went up to her and told her I saw the injustice, and she got tearful. It must be a endless carousel of misery to do that job at EWR right now.)