Stranger

While it is true that (1) the OP hd paid for an exit row and (2) it was the airline's problem, that is not an excuse to sit in a seat that one has not been assigned to.

The crew would have had every right to kick the OP out.

YOWgary

Yeah, that's not remotely how any of this works.

OP would absolutely be entitled to a refund of the seat-selection fee they paid. Full stop, that's it.

If I'm booked in J on a 789 that gets swapped to a 788, I don't get to simply park my butt in any business seat I like, and yell "not my problem, not my problem" hoping the crew simply won't do their jobs, and smugly declare that I've solved everything.

The only thing I have left to say about this nonsense that won't violate FT's content rules is to express my firm hope that OP's next flight sees them bumped to a Rouge middle, between two college football players.

aviators99

Sat in those seats, ready to get up as soon as asked. We couldn't stay in the aisle because we were blocking people. The FA was summoned immediately, and as soon as she got there we explained it and she did not ask us to get up, despite collecting our boarding passes and bringing them out to the GA. When the people came who was assigned our seats we discussed the situation and they had no interest in the exit row and were happy to sit in 18. I know there are plenty of jerks out there, but we were not going to be. I was posting to see if this is a common occurance (for Rouge to change equipment and not tell the station).

YOWgary

That sounds like a great reason to "temporarily" sit in your assigned seats, instead of taking the ones you wanted that belonged to somebody else.

You took the nicer ones away from the people they belonged to, hoping nobody would stop you.

Congratulations.

RangerNS

Rouge happens to have a type with a couple of layouts, and tends towards stations with contracted staff. But shares central dispatch and IT with mainline (who also do layout, if not type, swaps too)

So maybe not "because Rouge", because not. But avoiding Rouge may reduce seeing this kind of issue.

Arcanum

So you'd have booked AA at a worse time instead of sitting in a regular Y seat on Rouge for a couple of hours? That seems like a poor choice, but you do you.

Personally, I've flown Rouge many times down the back and have never had any complaints. The seats are comfortable, the crews are friendly, and usually there's streaming entertainment. Compared to the 2+ hour Q400 flights on Jazz that Rouge replaced, it's a positively luxurious experience.

SuperCargo

I would challenge whether the seats morally actually "belonged" to others. OP paid for exit row seats, the others didn't. Also I think the "hoping nobody would stop you" is unfair given the OP's descriptions of events. Sometimes you need to make a minor nuisance of yourself for flight staff to give a d*mn, especially when it comes to seating issues, and even more if you're dealing with Rouge. As long as OP wasn't being a jerk to the people wrongly assigned to the exit row, I don't see what the big deal is. People need to advocate for themselves when no-one else is going to do it for them. Do you honestly think that the issue would have been resolved to everybody's satisfaction if OP took their assigned seats, pushed the call button, and in the meantime the people assigned to the exit row sat in theirs? The flight attendant would have just told them to take it up with AC upon arrival, which in the current environment would have taken hours of sitting on hold and probably weeks before resolution. The way the OP handled it, everybody got what they paid for and deserved.

I would have a different view on this if the OP hadn't PAID FOR the exit row and the other people had. In this situation I think the seats belonged to the OP. The other people obviously did nothing wrong -- this was completely AC's fault -- but neither did the OP in my opinion!

YOWgary

There's a whole set of detailed policies that specify exactly what happens here, and just to skip you ahead, the phrase "yeah, but who really DESERVES the extra legroom" is not featured.

OP was entitled to a full refund of their seat-selection fees. They absolutely were not entitled to bully others out of their assigned seats, and the boarding phase of a flight offers absolutely no provision for philosophical debate.

This isn't the least bit complicated.

Duff76

I think the moral of this story is that one should never fly Rouge.

SuperCargo

From my reading, the only people bullied were the flight attendants to take action, which again I personally have no issue with. I don't see how the other passengers were bullied as they didn't even need to make any decisions or take any action, as just the fact that they were not seated meant that the plane couldn't depart (and hence forcing the hand of the flight attendants to do something to solve the problem). Let's face it, the flight attendants could have just ordered the OP to take their assigned seats and that would have been that. The fact that they ended up in the exit row shows that the flight attendants sympathized and agreed with the OP's understanding that they belonged in the seats in question.

arf04

The example you give is not at all the same as the one the OP describes. Would you really suck it up and fly TATL, say, if you got on the aircraft and your lie flat was renumbered so it was an economy seat and someone’s economy seat was numbered as a lie flat?

In the OP’s case the seat type paid for was numbered differently: since it still exists (as opposed to your example where the actual seat doesn’t exist in the 787 downgrade) it is reasonable to try to sort it out.

I take the OP at their word that they were not being unreasonable with crew as the crew were willing to resolve the issue.

jazzsax

For reference, I've had FA's on both mainline AND rouge in cases like this tell me to just sit down while they sort it out. They grab the BP's, work out the manifest then sort it out.

I don't think the OP did much wrong, especially if he/she/they were willing to move. If they were adamant they were going to start a scene, different story.

I've also had this happen in J. Not common but it has happened.

canadiancow

You and the OP have no idea what the other people paid for.

I paid for exit row seats by earning SE status last year. As a result, I effectively "pre-paid" for preferred seats on all fares on all markets.

Additionally, I almost exclusively fly Comfort and Latitude fares within North America, which, again, include preferred seats as part of the paid offering.

And that's assuming these people didn't have someone else book it for them, or go in at check-in and pay for an "upgrade", as I have occasionally done for travelling family.

I could easily easily see me buying my dad an exit row at check-in, and him getting bullied out the way the OP describes in this situation.

You are entitled to sit in the seat indicated on your boarding pass.

The system behaves very differently when there's an actual cabin change. And there is no aircraft in the fleet where what you describe is possible.

SuperCargo

Your description doesn't fit with the situation. It sounds like the equipment change wasn't captured in the system -- they boarded passengers into non-existent seats -- so your hypothetical situation with your dad would never happen. When your dad checked in, he wouldn't have been assigned the exit row regardless of your intervention, as on the system it would already be assigned to the OP!

I'm an SE and I don't lay claim to every preferred seat on the plane. If someone else explicitly books the exit row before I do, it's theirs -- especially if they pay cash for it. What people seem to be missing here is that as far as AC was concerned, the OP was in an exit row seat. The fact that the plane that they rolled out wasn't what matched their computer seat map is their problem to fix, and to me, what transpired was the fairest outcome. Everybody got what they were expecting to get when they checked in.

I don't get how people see those other people as being bullied. If I go to the dry cleaners and I give a claim ticket to pick up an Armani suit and the guy next to me hands over a claim ticket to pick up a t-shirt, and if the dry cleaner gets the tickets mixed up and gives us each the wrong item, I'm not bullying the other customer by pointing out to the dry cleaner that they mixed up the claim tickets. I'm correcting their error. This is what's going on here -- the OP is pointing out AC's obvious error, not bullying other customers who had got a windfall of an exit row seat despite having checked into a regular seat.

arf04

Of course it's not possible. That was my point (or one of them). I was replying specifically to the example from the dude who invoked a 787 downgrade in defence of crapping on the OP the exit row seat they had paid for: it's not an applicable example. Sarcasm is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.