When you are Gold and you purchase an award flight for someone else (in this case my dad), my experience in the past has always been that I can select a gold seat. Something weird has happened this time around though. I had gold seats selected both ways and on the way here things were fine, but now on the return flight I went to check-in and noticed his seat was given away and I can no longer select a gold seat on his itinerary.

Something obviously was changed with that res. When I call in to change the seat I am told I cannot give him a gold seat because i'm not traveling with him.

So, my question is, why does the computer let me select a gold seat to begin with (and always has) if this indeed shouldn't be allowed, is this a glitch? Does it state anywhere what the rule for this scenario actually is? And are AS agents really manually looking at these types of itinerary's and unpurposely kicking out non-mvps from mvp seats? this seems strange to me

needless to say i'm fairly upset since now it's the day of flight and all that's left are middle seats in the back, when prior to whatever happened he had 8F confirmed

thanks