From time to time people report last minute seat changes with the excuse "sorry, we just realised that the seat is broken", only to find someone else sitting in their old seat when everyone boards. Often this is explained by BA as staff travel i.e. a staff member was given the broken seat and the full fare customer assigned to one that wasn't broken

On a long haul flight to LHR yesterday (I won't name the route) Mrs Ned and I selected our CW seats months in advance, checked in online and collected our boarding passes and went to the gate when boarding was announced. On entering the gate we both got "the beep" when our boarding passes were scanned. Ever the optimist, I hoped it meant an upgrade to first class, but instead we were given new boarding passes for seats at the back of the CW cabin by the toilets (which I would never select). Resistance was futile as "one of the seats is broken and doesn't recline"

When we boarded I walked past the "broken" seat and gave it it try. It reclined just fine. Taking our new seats down the back, we were surprised to see a couple we'd seen in the lounge sitting down at our old seats. Mrs Ned wasn't having that, so she asked a member of crew what was going on and engaged the couple to try and find out what had happened.

It turned out the couple who were now in our old seats had exactly the same experience at the gate - they were "kicked out" of the seats we now had and given our old seats because one of their seats was allegedly "broken".

They were happy to swap so that we all sat in the seats we'd originally chosen online, and they all worked fine.

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps there really was an intermittent problem with one of our seats, the flight was full, and as GGL and Gold BA decided to fob the unreliable seat off onto another passenger without status?

Weird