In these days where airlines are squeezing more and more passengers into their airplanes and juggling their schedules to extract more and more “efficiencies” from their route structure, seat reservations are becoming less and less reliable.
Seats for families that had been reserved together months in advance are disappearing. Passengers who carefully reserved right aisle seats on a southbound flight from Boston to Miami in order to avoid the strong morning sun find themselves jockeying for middle seats after being unceremoniously moved by an airline computer.
When I checked in online for the outbound flight about eight hours before departure, our boarding passes listed the seats I had reserved, as expected. But when I checked in for the return flight, about 10 hours in advance, I found I had been reassigned seats in the middle of a four-across row.
The “change seats” option showed that no window/aisle combinations were available.
Customer service was no help, saying seats weren’t really reserved until I checked in – which can’t be done until 24 hours before the flight – so my only option was to plead my case at the airport.
The airlines have told me that anyone who pays for a special seat will get that type of seat no matter what. But all best are off in the case of equipment change. Then passengers who have lost “extra-room seats” because of a change are reduced to petitioning the airline for a refund after the flight. Your seat can disappear quickly, but refunds come slowly.
Even though the airlines vehemently deny it, I am sure that some of the seat shenanigans are created by airlines trying to please their most frequent fliers. Recent testimony submitted to DOT clearly notes that the airlines have a scoring system when it comes to assigning seats and, perhaps, even to price offers.
I recently flew on Southwest Airlines, where every one gets the same chance at seats unless they are willing to pay the walk up fares plus an additional fee. In the old days, I remember friends who had flown on Southwest complaining of the cattle car boarding systems.
Today, most of the complaints are coming from the airlines with assigned seats. Passengers crowd around the gate trying to be the first in their group. Gate agents really have no good way to maintain control and the boarding process can degenerate into chaos.
Recent reports from travelers who have never flown on Southwest but who have just had their first experience is a surprise at the simplicity of the system and how it keeps the boarding area free of the crowding and jostling that the assigned seat crowd faces. Who would have thought that picking your own seat would be seen as a perk rather than another cost-saving ploy.
Of course, those who know the Southwest system can check in early and give themselves a better chance at an aisle or window seat, but then again with the extra legroom found on Southwest and the shorter average flight times even the middle seat isn’t as much of a flight in Limbo as a hop on a 37-seat regional jet favored by the legacy carriers.
In the meantime, the legacy carriers are faced with more and more unhappy passengers who are moved out of their “reserved” seats and faced a new situation that assessed by an airline computer profile.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
