Scott,

Can you provide us some insight as to what seats CO blocks no matter what until the time of check-in and/or airport control. Specifically when it comes to the 737s of all variations, it seems that the aisle seats in the bulkhead row are always blocked until the time of check-in and/or airport control. For example, this would include 5C and 5D on the 735s. While I know that the FAA requires you to hold back some disability seating, is there any reason why both bulkhead aisles need to be withheld even from elites until the time of check-in? Is this a FAA mandate, a CO-imposed practice, or are my eyes deceiving me?

No flyer57, just a bug. In this next release made some behind-the-scenes changes to how we interpret seat maps for our 737-300/500/700s, and we were incorrectly interpreting any main cabin seat that didn't have a seat in front of it.

Hi SAT Lawyer, these seats are blocked until the day of departure to satisfy an FAA requirement for customers with disabilities. We do block a portion of our bulkhead seats for the exclusive use of customers with disabilities (5ABC plus a few others behind the bulkhead on the 737-300/500/700). For operational purposes, we additionally reserve one or more bulkhead seats for airport use, and will only allow pre-assignment to customers with disabilities, unaccompanied minors and customers requiring a bassinet (which wouldn't apply to the 737s). This would explain the additional inavailability of 5D on the 737-300/500/700 until the check-in window.

CO Insider, can you comment as to why the 738 w/ the newly installed 1A/B seats have a small amount of elite seating compared to other 738s? The 735s, 733s, and 73Gs even have more elite seats compared to the 738 with 1A/B installed. I just find it strange that a 738 has only 3-4 rows of premium seating.

Unfortunately, as a consequence of the policy of not just blocking the ABC side of the bulkhead row, but also seat D in that row, there are zero above-average aisle seats on a sizable chunk of your fleet available for elites to reserve at the time of booking. I really wish CO would consider removing the block on 5D on the 733/735/73G since it is not required by the FAA. How often do you really have four special needs persons on any one domestic narrow-body flight anyway?

Hi OPFlyer, We're not aware of this issue with any of our 737-800 seat maps. In full disclosure, however, we did have this exact issue with our retrofit 737-900 aircraft, whose seat maps were incorrectly configured with only 3-4 rows of Premium Seats. This issue was corrected earlier this month. If indeed you have an example of this on any 737-800 flight, please send me a PM with the flight/date example.

UPDATE (8/22 1:30pm): Thanks OPFlyer. You are correct, it appears that we do have only 4 rows of Premium Seats (plus the two Exit Rows) on our 737-800s with the 16-seat front cabin. We agree this is insufficient and will be expanding this by 3 additional rows within the next month. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Hi SAT Lawyer, when we make configuration decisions like this, we have very strong operational reasons for doing so. Having this aisle seat blocked instead of the window or middle, for example, gives us much better flexibility for those special needs customers who absolutely require bulkhead aisle access (and this happens a lot more often than you think). This being the case, allowing Elite members to pre-assign these bulkhead aisle seats would increase the risk of seat reassignment should a special needs customer need that seat. As you might imagine, customers in general aren't too pleased when their seat assignments get changed (especially in the eleventh hour when there are little to no decent seats to be moved to), and it's important to us to minimize this exposure.

Thanks COInsider. Glad to hear it!

This is good to hear. Thanks for looking into this. ^

This issue has been corrected, and all 737-800 seat maps now have a Premium Seating section through row 15. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.

^

My father and I have this issue on the site. I saw it when I was on a flight to LA, but I ignored it because I didn't care that much.

My father though, really wants the exit rows on his flight to Europe at the end of the month. He then called OP and they said they could only assign the exit row seats 24 hrs prior to departure.
But he said that today the exit row seats are gone. I wonder if the OP agent was confused?

Is he a plat or gold?

Just silver. But this is the first time he's ever had an issue reserving empty exit row seats upon booking. He makes at least one, if not two trips in Y to Europe a year. There could be a rule change that we're not aware of.

It has been policy for quite sometime now that only Plats/Golds, as well as their traveling companions, can reserve exit rows >24hrs.