Complaint: Customer Service No seat assignment-rude gate staff
View Single Post
  #3  
Old Jun 17, 2010, 12:01 AM
camarors camarors is offline
 
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 8
Default Reply

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gromit801 View Post
I would generally agree with you. But that's not fair to other passengers who might have reserved their specific seats before you did. Everyone has a reason for wanting to sit in certain seats. Of course some don't care, and those are the ones you have to appeal to.

I do sympathize, but I also understand that if other travelers were forced to change seats they already reserved, there would be some very LOUD conversations on the aircraft.
The issue here is that the airline should have a block of seats reserved to deal with issues like children sitting with their parents, online problems that have messed up seating, etc. Airlines have policies that large people have to buy two seats. This doesn't happen until they check in. So, the airline has to have two seats together to offer the passenger if they are going to make the passenger pay for two seats. All of these situations require empty seats to accommodate. When I called Alaska Airlines today to ask them if they would treat me this way as I need a flight in July through them that has only middle seats left and I'm again flying with my son, they said that wouldn't happen on their airline, that they reserve a block of seats to deal with the situation. The other thing that should happen is that reservation systems should automatically detect who is flying (ie. a child) and ensure that a reservation will work before letting it go through online. It should have automatically moved us to two seats together that it had reserved when I made the reservation.