WARNING: Do not book business class seats on 'new' 777s just yet
 

Buyer beware: If you are hoping to enjoy the fully-reclinable seats in the newly configured 777s that UAL has been touting, I would advise either waiting until all the planes have been updated, or just book with another airline.

I booked a roundtrip trans-Atlantic flight in business class. I made sure with the (very helpful) reservations agent that it would indeed be the newly configured 777s, as some of the old 777s were still in circulation.

Unfortunately, on both legs of my trip, the plane was changed at the last second to the old plane. The planes were old, the worn seats had lost their stuffing, and were not fully-reclinable. I found out that only a fraction of the 777 fleet had, as of yet, been updated, and that most of the newly configured 777s fly the trans-Pacific route.

Of course I know that the airlines can't guarantee the type of seat. But the difference in between the new and the old 777s is so disparate, I feel sort of ripped off. If they know that only a small percentage of the new planes are flying, I feel like UAL should let you know up front that it's very likely that you will not get to fly in one.

When you call an airline's reservation center 9 times out of 10 it has been outsourced to India, China or some other country. I believe that JetBlue, Southwest and Air Tran mayby a few commuter airlines have US based call centers.
Also, they can tell you what you want to hear, that does not make it so. They do not have a list of the recently refurburished or updated aircrafts. They do not know which aircraft will operate which routing. That determination is made by a combination of maintaince control sending or call system operations to let them know which aircrafts can fly due to certain ETOPS regulations, and which aircraft's may have certain specific M.E.L.s (Min. Euip. List) that may prohibit say ORD-HKG, bu can fly IAD-LHR due to being a shorter distance. this way an aircraft can make it back to a city in which their maintaince personal can better srvice the aircraft.
So in short just because someone you may know was lucky enough to fly on a newly refurbuished and updated cabin, does not always make it acros the board that all aircrafts have been done.:D

Agreed. But the OPs comment is valid and really useful. I was planning on flying US-Europe business class next month on United BECAUSE of their new-flat bed seats. However, if I'm not 100% certain its not the new 777 configs, I might as well switch to lufthansa. I get the *A miles, and a better product.