Equipment swaps happen all the time and if you travel enough you’ll encounter one. Sometimes it’s a bad one, like when you planned a flight specifically to sit in an airline’s newest version of a lie-flat suite, and end up on a plane that’s 20 years old. There are other times when the swap is in your favor, like when you were previously sitting in an economy seat but because the new plane has more first-class seats, you’re upgrade clears.
And then there’s what happened to us on a United flight.
When I booked this trip from Newark to Orlando I wrote how I found it strange that United would use a 757-200 with Polaris seats on a 2-hour flight.
I booked seats 24 D & F, hoping that we’d end up with an empty middle seat.
Two days before the flight, Sharon received a text message from United.
We had to change the aircraft type or seating configuration for your flight to Orlando. Because of the switch, you have a new seat assignment. We’ve done our best to keep your original preference and you can check for a new seat using the link below.
Her seat was changed from 24D to 24C, which was still an aisle seat. What’s interesting was that’s the only way she was notified. No email. No push message from the app.
More interesting is that my seat also changed and I received no notifications. My seat was moved from 24F to 23F. We were now sitting 1 row apart, on opposite sides of the aisle. I went to see if we could find two seats together but the flight was almost full. All that was left were a few solo middle seats in Economy Plus or the last row. (Not that it would matter to United that I’d want to sit in the same row as my wife when we’re on the same PNR)
I found it interesting that the seat right next to Sharon, 24E, was missing from the seating map. I tried to figure out why but there was no info on why this seat was missing.
We kept our reassigned seats and boarded the plane. When I got to my row, there was someone in my seat. He didn’t know about a new seat and was now seated in the opposite aisle. The person in that seat was sitting one row from his assigned seat next to his travel partner. Both of them wanted to sit with their group.
The flight attendant helped sort things out and we did a three-way swap where I ended up seated in 23A, one row in front of Sharon, on the window.
When I looked over the back of the seat, the mystery of why the 24E seat was blocked on the seat map was solved.
Apparently, the middle seat was broken. While I thought our seats were moved due to a change in planes, I’m curious if this is what caused United to move passengers around. If we received an alert on Friday, would they leave a broken seat until Sunday? How long does it take to get a seat fixed?
It will only cost them if the flights operated by that plane are 100% full and it makes financial sense to fly with a broken seat until the plane is due to come in for scheduled repairs instead of taking it out of service for a busted chair.
My advice is to keep checking your reservations. Both to make sure that your flights are still happening as well as to check that you haven’t lost your seat assignments.
I’m not mad with United about this. The only gripe is why they couldn’t have given me the row with the empty middle seat 🙂
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