Notification of F oversold on a flight two months from now
 

I received a slightly odd notification this week that one of my flights scheduled about two months from now is oversold in F and they are looking for volunteers to downgrade or change flights. I know that F can get oversold during IRROPS, but two months out? That sounds like either a painful computer glitch or they are deliberately experimenting with overselling F. Has anyone else experienced that recently?

I haven't called yet to see what they're offering. I used GGUs for this flight so I am moderately concerned that if a solution does not present itself to them they're going to downgrade the upgrades first with little warning.

Did they perhaps change the schedule and now plan to use a 738 in place of a 739?

If you're interested in compensation, call them instead of wasting time here: DOT rules do not require IDB compensation when a smaller aircraft is used (although F passengers will get difference in fare refunded).

This one is pretty simple. An aircraft substitution is all it takes to lose 4 F seats. AS will likely downgrade in reverse order of UG. Thus, the certs. may well go if there aren't any takers. The question is what is AS offering beyond the obvious which is required by DOT and its own COC, e.g., the fare difference between F & Y. In OP's case, that would be the return of the GGU's. If it's simply, an ask with no customer service gesture associated with it, why on earth would you take this? If you are worried about the DG, perhaps reroute?

For the OP, downgrade experiences during last year's 738 reconfig for examples of what AS was offering then:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/alas...rst-class.html

Good point, I had not even considered that because it was a 738 when I booked the flights and is a 738 today. It's a PDX to Hawaii route, so it did not seem likely to me that they might switch to a 739 and change it back again to a 738 in the span of a few weeks.

I don't particularly want compensation but I agree I'll probably need to call and see what's going on. My motivation for wasting time here is more to see if there's a recent pattern of this.

For what its worth, I also received a similar notification in the last few days on a PDX-KOA routing a ways out. F oversold and looking for volunteers to change without any discussion of compensation in the request. We called in and were able to change to a flight 2 days later maintaining our seats in first and received $300 voucher each(companion ticket) as compensation. No hassles over compensation as it was offered up front and the only difficulty was finding an acceptable flight with open first as we preferred to not downgrade. Two day change was ok because it extended our stay in Hawaii and we are in a situation where there is no additional lodging cost.

Alaska is now doing generic placeholder 737s for future schedules with capacity mirroring the 737-800s, which should reduce problems like the OP's.

Just another reason to not book row 4. EVER. I even heard about a plane swap happening same day. I had people complaining about one of my SEA/LAX flights because it was swapped to a non-premium cabin plane and those in premium were griping.

I've noticed the generic seat map showing up for the 739's with 12 in F. Guessing RevMgmt is only releasing 12F in this case then too? May make things more awkward :o (well, keeping things more consistent)

Didn't AS used to schedule 734s on most non-Hawaii flights until a couple months out for the same reason?

734 was defiantly a placeholder aircraft.

RIP to that classic.

I got the same email the other day flying AUS - SEA. They said the flight was oversold and offered only to pay the difference between coach and U fare. It was a 737-800 on the original booking and did not change. There were 4 seats open on the flight, all middle seats in the back of the bus. I did not get booted but would have been furious if they did it to me. This was not an aircraft change - and I do not get why they oversell.

So this is somewhat related so will dump it here. I have a VX flight coming up booked through the AS site. Four days out from the flight I got an email from AS looking for volunteers on an oversold segment. They offered a $400 discount/voucher so I jumped on it. If you get one of these, expect some run around. The email instructed to call in, but the AS reps seemed to not know this was a thing (they incorrectly thought I could do it through the website like for AS but no). A call or two by them found the right place they needed to contact. Flight switched and the $400 code came by email about 48 hours later as promised. Quite happy with this.

EDIT: Also adding this was not for F - just regular cattle class