Dear Alex,
In August last year, my family and I booked economy class return tickets to fly with Emirates between San Francisco and Addis Ababa via Dubai. Everything was fine on the outward trip but on the return Emirates moved our seat allocation back 15 rows. The plane type was unchanged.
Emirates tells me that selecting seats does not guarantee you will end up in them. Can an airline simply change seat assignments at will?
Deron Marvin, Addis Ababa
Dear Alex,
When is a confirmed seat booking actually guaranteed as confirmed? We recently flew business class with Thai Airways from London to Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong. Three of the four sectors worked as expected but when we reported for the Hong Kong-Bangkok flight we found our seats had been released. We produced a paper copy of our itinerary but to no avail.
There are perceived good and bad seats on all planes and seatplans.com [businesstraveller.com’s sister website] is very useful in this respect. How do we ensure we get the seats we reserve?
Louis Brennan, London
Alex replies:
Specific seats can never be guaranteed. That is why carriers use the terminology “requested” rather than “confirmed”. The word “guarantee” is not used because if a specific seat allocation could not be honoured then a passenger might demand compensation.
It does not happen often but airlines do change seat requests. Perhaps it is because a different plane is rostered – a prime example was Air France’s use of a 538-seat A380 in place of the normal 125-170 seater A320 on selected London-Paris flights this summer.
Other reasons could be an in-flight entertainment malfunction in a particular seat, a group booking or a high tier loyalty member pulling rank over “less important” passengers.
