Dealt with this Monday morning LAX-EWR (1162 — I think N623VA). The gate agents claimed the renumbering happened overnight. They seemed very ill-prepared, but not their fault. Premium Economy was not reissued new tickets with the new row numbers. Chaos during boarding, lots of confused passengers. The FAs were understandably exasperated. Felt particularly bad for the 6’6” guy who was supposed to be in what used to be 10C.

Eventually the gate agents came on, and had everyone in the exit rows deboard so Premium Economy folks could move to those rows. Not very elegant, but the best resolution to a bad situation, I suppose. Certainly better than letting the flight go out with PE customers in Economy seats and vice-versa. Clearly a terrible rollout.

I question whether the renumbering is even necessary. These cabins are getting redone anyway. Or, maybe it’s better to deal with confusion and inefficiency now vs. later, when some Airbuses are reconfigured and others aren’t? I dunno. This isn’t my day job. But OTOH, certainly they can reassign seats before anyone checks in to avoid this issue needing to be resolved at the gate?

AS twitter feed has several PC seat bumps scattered in there recently.

Considering PC with advance seat assignments is almost always either elite, people who paid extra for the seats, or both, seems like the people an airline would least like to annoy.

I know it’s a rhetorical question, but I think the answer is this is a fair customer service solution. They can’t change the problem, so perhaps CS has noticed this works. I still feel your pain, but I would have already tried snagging row 6 in your situation (or row 17)... Row 6 is better than row 23 on any AS airbus.