Kacee

Justified rant.

tpwoofs

narvik

Answer in post #5 from this thread reads:

"Whatever number the monkey hits with the dart."

jsloan

No.
No.

findark

I think 1CH has a good chance of ending up in 1DG, but that's probably not helpful

Beyond that, it's a little bit more deterministic than the monkey and the dartboard, but not enough that anyone can give a really helpful answer unfortunately.

StuckinITH

Who knows, you might get a pmCO 772.....like my wife and I did on a ORD-PVG in May this year and lost our seats in the former First Class area. Then K and J might translate to 8L and 8K......or to something totally different......

The problem is when United does those swaps at the last minute and assigns all seats you just get what you get and there is no chances of getting better seats.

narvik

So far, I have been lucky, and was able to switch to better seats than what was auto-assigned.
Of course this requires the cabin not being full or not fully checked in/assigned, and some constant checking on what plane they are actually going to use.

So, all you're really saying is that the monkey has some semi-decent skills at playing darts!

StuckinITH

I seem to recall that you fly often to Asia where it's quite common for passengers on those flights not to choose their seats until they check-in and many do it at the airport.

On our flight to PVG in May where we had 4 plane types in the last 72 hours we managed to get extremely good seats at swaps #1 and #2 that happened at T-60 and T-48. I also improved my seat at check-in. Then at T-5, our luck turned sour.... In the First Class area, my wife had 2A and I had 2C. Very good seats, across the aisle from each other. Swapped to the pmCO. 2A remained as 2A. Just behind the toilet so noises.....and window with having to jump over the passenger in 2B. Not good. My seat 2C became 2D. At least it was an aisle seat but still too close to that toilet. Swap happened just when we had finished boarding our first flight and I had to close my phone. When we landed in ORD, we managed to switch to 3D and 4D. In a perfect world, we would have gotten seats xD and xE next to each other but there were no E seats left at that time. However, if we look at the glass being half full, we were more lucky than the couple who had 1C and 1H in the pmUA772 and got 1D and 1E in the pmCO 772...... And my wife did get a good ETC after she wrote to the 1K line. But we have no way to know how much of the ETC was due to the fact that the United agents at our home airport cannot through check luggage for UA-UA flights on different PNRs which was the second thing she complained about. In 40 years of flying as an adult, this is only the third time that she writes to complain to an airline which shows that she was really annoyed........

narvik

(bolding mine)
Ah! I think you are absolutely correct and that is INDEED the crucial factor! ^


At least UA made up for it (with the ETC) in your case/your wife's case. Nice.

StuckinITH

Only my wife. She did not even think of an ETC. She just needed to vent..... She did it one week after the facts as she was still getting upset about it.

I have to say that now we don't have any long haul international flights for a very, very long time. We can wait until United starts selling PP out of ORD......

dkc192

Is this a regular occurrence? I thought they haven't started freely swapping pmCO and pmUA planes, which is to say that a pmUA IPTE plane should only get swapped to a pmUA Polaris plane, and vice versa. To be clear, I'm talking about "regular" frame swapping in the T-3d window that is the main topic of this thread, not advanced schedule changes or last-minute IRROPS when they just find any available plane and send it out (either of which could have been you). Just trying to clarify under what circumstances this happened.

PsiFighter37

I feel like the process from swapping on 777s is going to be easier than 767s. Earlier this year on MAD-EWR, we got swapped from a legacy 2-class 763 to a Polaris-outfitted 763. I didn't mind - I looked at the seat map and got us a middle and aisle seat. Then, shortly thereafter, they swapped us to a 764, none of which have been retrofitted. In that case, I really wanted our original seat assignments, but I couldn't get them - and now the seat map was in total disarray. I think we ended up in row 7 or row 8 instead, as in the old 2-1-2 config, I wanted us to be sitting window/aisle - but I didn't want to be too close to the galley separating J and Y.

We got punted from a 78J to an sCO 772 earlier this year, but because we had picked middle seats, they kept that (which I appreciated). But since 2-1-2 v. 1-1-1 is quite different, those can be quite frustrating to deal with. That said, it is a temporary (if multi-year) problem that J passengers will have to deal with.

StuckinITH

When it happened in May I had no clue that something like that could happen (although I should have recalled that maybe it was findark who had mentioned once many months ago that with the FAs agreement in place for the full joining of United and Continental those planes could be interchanged). We would not have minded so much if our pmUA 772 was swapped for a Polarized one. After it happened, I checked flight status and it seemed that that week it happened two or three times. However, prior to our end of June trip to PVG, I checked again and there were no more incidences of this happening on that itinerary.

findark

I think the final straw for the sCO/sUA swaps was the movement of some of the sCO frames to ORD in order to get PE-equipped birds into EWR (and make sure ORD retained its crown of consistently the worst UA hard product in the fleet )

StuckinITH

I know that the pmUA 772 is generally disliked due to the 2-4-2 in Business but somehow it worked well for me as I tend to book my tickets early when I have plenty of choice of good seats. In the past 3 years, I took 20 flights on the pmUA 772. I was 15 times in Business: I only had to sit one time in a middle seat (an upgrade when already inside the plane but lucky for me my wife got the aisle seat next to me when upgraded 20 minutes later) and I got 2 times seats in the former First Class area. I was 4 times in Economy: 3 times I had managed to get a seat in the bulkhead 2-seaters (Row 20) and 1 time an aisle seat in Row 23. I was 1 time in First Class with a TOD.

To go back to the subject of this thread, I have one data point for what seat you get if you chose seat 20J on the pmUA 772. On the Polarized version, I got 20F. Makes sense as the computer knows that a J seat is supposed to be a middle seat. My wife, who had the window seat 20K on the pmUA 772, got the window seat 20L. The rest of Row 20 was empty so I got back a seat next to my wife: 20K. We got upgraded 25 hours later so I would have escaped anyway from seat 20F if I had not been able to change it.