Last August my wife and I booked flights from Seattle to Nairobi, Kenya and back. The flights are next month. This will entail 4 flights, Seattle to London, London to Nairobi, Nairobi to London and London to Seattle. At the time we made the booking we also paid for our premium economy seats and was told we had confirmed seats. Since then we have received 11 emails from BA stating that “Your seats have been changed”. Up till a month ago the changes were a bit aggravating, all were because of changes in the aircraft used for the flight. A month ago we got another of these emails, I went in to see what seats we had for our Seattle to London flight. Instead of seats, there was a comment to select our seats. But there were no seats available. We called BA and were told that we will be on the airplane, seat location will be determined prior to the flight.
We are now only 4 weeks out and we are getting worried. Yesterday we got another of the emails, I found both the Seattle/London and London/Seattle have changed. The Seattle to London flight still did not show any assigned seats but when I went into the change seats page, I found 2 empty seats. I selected them but they are not what we wanted, in the middle of a row of 4 seats and next to the lavatories. The London to Seattle flight now has us sitting in different rows, me in a window seat that is totally unacceptable and my wife 2 rows behind me. Another call to BA went of deaf ears, they say they can do nothing about the actual seats that were are assigned. Our only option will be to ask for refunds for the seats after our flights.
Anyone else have to deal with kind of crap from BA?
Perhaps, as you suggest, your original seats disappeared when they changed aircraft and now they don’t have any suitable seats to give you. Do you live in or near Seattle? It looks like you would have to go to the Seattle/Tacoma airport to speak to someone from British Airways in person about it.
Unless you absolutely have to make this trip I would call and threaten to cancel if they can’t guarantee acceptable seating for you and your wife. If they can’t, I would expect a 100% refund and I would accept nothing less. There are presumably other airlines that fly to Nairobi. I see that United Airlines flies to Nairobi from Seattle via its partner Lufthansa.
If you want expert advice on anything related to air travel (and this goes for anyone reading this), the go-to forum is FlyerTalk. They have a forum specific for British Airways, here:
@racer72 - I would be very unhappy with that situation. I must have at least extended/stretch seating.
I can manage in regular seats for ~2 hours, as long as I’m on the aisle. But for the length of your flights? No way for me.
/aside - Recently flew to Pittsburgh. The kiosk printed out a boarding pass for Orlando. ??? ummm. Help! Luckily my bag made it, I was going to a funeral. /aside
I worked for British Airways 30 years ago, it varied by route but typically 10-15% of passengers did not turn up (If you paid a lot more than the standard fair you could get a fully flexible ticket where if you missed your flight you could simply go on the next one, these were so expensive that if you know you would either be in fligth A or flight B it would often be cheaper to get a non-fleible ticket for each flight).
“to enable more people to travel on their prefered aircraft” BA like all airlines overbooked, If you expect 15% of people to noshow for a 300 seat aircraft you are very unlikely to run out of seats if you sell 330 but of course you can not allocate all 330 of those bookings a seat.
In those days the majority of bookings did not have a seat allocated until they checked in (which was at the airport) so I am not sure how they deal with overbooking today.