I had an issue last week with selecting my seats, woke up at 1AM in order to choose seats for a redeye the next day, and happily found an exit-row window available. I selected it, it asked me the exit-row qualification questions, then I printed my BP and went back to sleep. The next night as I prepared to board the plane, I found to my displeasure that the BP had the same seat assignment as I had originally been assigned, an aisle that guaranteed I would be knocked by passers-by as I tried to sleep. By this time the flight was full, so there was no seat-switching. The flight was not great, as I was afraid of, I got little sleep.

I wrote to customer service the next day, and got a reply that basically said, "you didn't select a different seat than the one you were assigned to", along with some kind of record from their website showing my seat selection. While I applaud the detail that they went into, along with the personally written response, it didn't answer my question about why it would have asked me the exit row questions, then not put me in that seat.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there some obvious mistake that I could have made at 1AM and not noticed? I guess the main lesson here is to always double-check on the boarding pass.