Paid for seating one-way - BA allocated seats on the other for free
 

I've searched the Dashboard thread on seating as well as the clinic and haven't seen this before, but apologies if I'm retreading old ground.

I'm a BA Blue and haven't had a need to pay for a seat in advance since the inception of the policy either because I've been on a full-fare or corporate ticket, or because I've travelled with my son and BA automatically seat us together 5 days before our flight.

In mid-November however, I am off to Spain for a weekend with my wife and two other couples. None of us have status and our outbound flight is on an Iberia A321. Their seating policy in Y is Kafkaesque so we decided to pay £10 each and managed to bag the rear exit row.

I logged into my booking today to pay the balance of the booking (it's a BA Holiday flight+hotel deal) and noticed that we had six seats allocated to us for the return trip. It's £12 if we want to change them so it looks very much like when BA pre-allocate seats to a family.

1. We don't fit any of the criteria for having seats pre-allocated to us
2. It's about 3 months to our flight
3. The seat map appears to be wide open

We're happy enough to sit together. BA have given us two blocks of three which is fine.

Has anyone else seen this before? Is it perhaps a soft policy to keep people happy? Pay for your seats one-way and whilst you still have to pay to select exact seats in the other direction, we'll keep you together if possible?

When I flew with family last year we had our seats assigned (there was four of us) by BA about a month and a half before.

However, next month doing EDI-LHR-MIA-CHS, then CHS-DFW-LHR-EDI on my own BA assigned me seats free of charge to everything but the long haul flights. And I can change all of the seats that I have been assigned for free as well.