Why Can't I Get A Seat on AA Eagle Codeshare?
 

Ok, here is why I'm in a crappy mood at 3AM. Booked nice little MR to SAN and gf is coming meeting me there. Very nice, right? So far, so good. Then I see that I can't get a seat assignment on LAX-SAN codeshare. Yes, it's a MR so I took the option that threw in another segment but was also tying my arrival to coincide with significant other. Record then showed AA confirmation number in the info for that flight so first I try to select a seat at aa.com online but am told that NW needs to handle this.

I call NW RA and she says AA has to assign the seat so I call back and finally get to talk to a supervisor who explains to me that this is a shell reservation and NW has to call AA and request a seat for me. So I then send a nice, friendly TTU explaining the entire situation and timeline, including what the supervisor told me almost verbatim.

Well, big Mike at nwa.com sends me the boilerplate response about selecting seats on NW and it is apparent he didn't even read the body of my comment. When I saw that my blood pressure went up and I then replied to big Mike that I was not happy that it appeared he didn't even bother to read the body of my message. I asked him if he felt confident enough in his response for me to show it to Bob Sudrup at the Freddie's in a couple of weeks.

That's when I get a nice response from Becky (who took the time to actually read my comments) saying that AA has not released seat map to NW, etc., and I thank her for reading and responding to my comments. Since she didn't know what I had actually done up to this point she suggested using the AA confirmation at AA.com to try to select my seats. I then filled her in that I had exhausted all possibilities and was just following the instructions by the AA supervisor AND that I interepreted his comments as being so simple that NW RA could simply call AA and get me a seat.

Okay, that's my 15 minutes of shame for this morning.l

You mean Bob Soukup? See, some people read the whole post ;).

AA codeshares are pretty bad. Apparently AA people aren't allowed to even touch a NW codeshare passenger even to do seat assignments. The way I did it when I needed seat assignments was to figure out what seats were empty on the AA flight (by calling AA or using AA.com) & then asking the NW agent to specifically request that seat. It's worked for me the 2 times I've flown the AA codeshares.

I always appreciate your attention to detail...like I said, it was 3AM!!!:p

It didn't get much better until I did AA version of TTU online at aa.com and explained my dilemma and nice lady assigned me a seat today. Out of the five NW people that were involved in the e-mail replies snowballing back and forth, three of them gave responses that made it quite apparent that they didn't even bother to read the entire string. Becky had it second and did the best job, calling AA and being told that I could now go in and select a seat. But it didn't work and didn't get any better.