<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by virtualtroy:
The ops manager at one of the airports I flew from told me that the check-in staff will be none the wiser [true?] and that seating is handled by BA centrally, not locally.</font>
In my case, I checked-in about 3 hours early for the flight, and it is quite likely that at the time I checked-in, nobody knew there was going to be an aircraft change. I can only assume this was a last minute change. However, the departure was more or less on-time, so it was not too last minute.
I can understand that the check-in people didn't know. However, when I entered the BA EC lounge they swiped my boarding pass, so they knew I was in there and could easily have paged me to discuss various options that would be acceptable to me an BA. I would have been happy to travel on any one of 6 different flights departing that night that would have got me to Brisbane on the same day as originally planned. I would have been happy to stay overnight in London and flown the following day on any BA, QF or CX flight, all of which my One World explorer ticket was valid for travel. They could have offered reasonable incentive for me to accept a downgrade.
But no, they decided to give me a B seat boarding pass in the WT cabin at the boarding gate instead.