Unexplained seat changes on Finnair

[Mattg]

I flew Finnair last week within Europe on a paid J fare. At the time of booking, I selected seat 2C. A few days before the flight, I noticed that I'd been moved to 1C without explanation. Then around a day before the flight, my seat was moved again to 4A. I did not initiate any of these changes and nobody else had access to the booking.

Any idea what was going on here?

FWIW, some Finnish businessmen ended up sitting in 2A & 2C - I suspect they were Platinum Lumo members or something. 1C was unoccupied at departure.

 

[RooFlyer]

Did you try and get the seats back, at any stage?

 

[Mattg]

Did you try and get the seats back, at any stage?

It wasn’t possible prior to airport checkin because someone else had taken 2C and 1C was blocked.

 

[torks]

Did you notice any changes to the seat map. With Eurobusiness they will sometimes add or subtract rows to business class, ie go from 4 rows to 2 rows by moving the divider. This may trigger a seat change, but it'd be unusual to drop below 2 rows of business I would've thought.

 

[Mattg]

Did you notice any changes to the seat map. With Eurobusiness they will sometimes add or subtract rows to business class, ie go from 4 rows to 2 rows by moving the divider. This may trigger a seat change, but it'd be unusual to drop below 2 rows of business I would've thought.

It's a very fair question but in this case the J cabin was always 5 rows and didn't change (even though there were only 6 people in J, in the end).

 

[docjames]

Seat maps and operating aircraft seem to be fairly flexible on AY.

A320s, 319s, 321s and E190s seem to get swapped around a lot depending on loads.

Whether that resets seat selection or not, who knows.

I’ve noticed they are less reliable since they aggressively started rolling out paid seat selection too…..

 

[henrus]

Any idea what was going on here?

These sorts of things aren't Finnair specific. On a QantasLink flight recently I had 6A selected, this was changed to 5D hours before and finally I ended up a few rows back. Onboard they'd seated someone in a wheelchair in row 6 so I guess some staff decided it was just easiest to move me.

Regardless as it can happen and as Finnair say on their website:

A requested seat cannot be guaranteed, as it may need to be changed for operational, safety or security reasons, for example if the aircraft type changes.

 

[Mattg]

Seat maps and operating aircraft seem to be fairly flexible on AY.

A320s, 319s, 321s and E190s seem to get swapped around a lot depending on loads.

That's a reasonable point. In the case of my flight, it was always an A319.