Originally Posted by
jsloan
If you couldn't be bothered to do the most basic research to get what you wanted, I don't know what to tell you. Does UA also owe you a refund if it's cloudy? Or if the aurora doesn't appear, or the flight path isn't what you expected, or you learned that mountains look less impressive than you expected from 15,000 feet directly above?
The passegners sat in the seat they paid for.
Nobody is questioning whether or not it is possible to display this information on the seating chart. Absolutely nobody. Nobody is claiming it's an IT issue. This is the straw-man-iest of all straw-man arguments. What I am saying is that it would cost millions of dollars to handle it properly when the inevitable tail swap occurs. UA isn't even particularly good at maintaining window vs. aisle. Now you're expecting them to navigate through a whole bunch of additional restrictions too, and you're adding a financial penalty if they fail.
If all you want is the display on the seatmap for the plane as it is currently assigned -- fine, it seems UA is moving that direction (ignoring for a moment the fact that UA doesn't assign specific plane types when the schedule opens). But it wouldn't have stopped the lawsuit; if anything, it would have strengthened it, by making it more feasible for somebody to claim that they selected a seat for a particular reason, and thus, when they didn't get it, they were irreparably harmed. "A flight attendant asked me to change seats to accommodate a family. Lawsuit!" "UA moved me out of the bulkhead row to accommodate someone with a mobility limitation. Lawsuit!"
If someone paid extra above the regular fare to sit in an aisle / window / extra legroom with a caveat that there can be an airplane swap or other sort of passenger accommodation, and agrees to refund this upcharge in the event that this seating arrangement ultimately did not occur, that's all that I'd expect. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less ...With a convenient checkbox to agree to these particular terms when choosing this seating, just prior to clicking the payment processing.
And that is all that I'd expect from an ethical business - provide the service I paid for, or refund the difference between what I paid for and what you served me. Ask 100 people off the street what an airplane window seat provides, and you'd likely hear from 120 people saying it is a seat that you probably have to crawl over two others to get to the aisle, but has a window that probably has an adjustable shade. My window seat, on the other hand, usually has an aisle on the other side of the seat (and sometimes two or three windows).
