I was SQ217 yesterday from Singapore to Melbourne. I was originally booked on SQ227 at night but my business finished early so I looked forward to travelling home on the 77W.

I was originally booked in 17K - upstairs windows sky-bed in the exit row of business. I managed to get 14K which is the first row of the second business cabin.

When I checked-in Singapore, (in the new first class area of T3) I was asked a strange question, are you sure you want a Window seat, I said yes, but at no stage was I told about the equipment swap.

Get to door 1L and look at the seats in first class and said - this isn't the 300ER. Cabin crew said no it had been swapped at the last minute. So my seat had turned from a loverly new seat at the bulk head, to the third row of of the front cabin, and I now had a seat mate to climb over. I was not happy.

Talking to the crew later, they said there were a lot of unhappy people as none of them had been told at check-in about the swap, and a lot had paid the extra to fly on the 300ER.

She also said it was going to hurt their return flight (3-Feb 00:50 - SQ218) as they had on rostered on 14 crew for the 772, and it normally has 15 crew for the 77W return.

I wonder how early they knew about it, as when I had checked Expertflyer in the lounge and looked at the seat map, for SQ217 on the 1st - it did come up with the 772 seat map. I put it down to Expertflyer playing up, as I had been getting funny seat maps when I looked at it previously (ie getting them from cache for two different flights). And they had rostered on less crew.

If I had paid extra for the 77W, I would be really pissed off. But why advertise that the 77W flies to Melbourne on these legs then swap out. But I would be EVEN MORE pissed off if getting on the plane at 00:50 on the 2nd of Feb to find regional seats instead of the new flat beds.

It was interesting that while in the lounge they said the 9:40am flight to Sydney was not going to leave until at least 11am as there was a problem with the plane. Why not delay our flight as well? Arriving at 8:20 in the evening doesn't leave much connection time to anywhere. So it wasn't as if connecting traffic would cause a problem.

While the crew tried their best. At no stage did the in-flight supervisor walk around and talk to the passengers and say sorry. Also this is the second time in January I have had to 20 minutes from landing ask where the express arrival cards were. Then next minute they rush around giving these out.