And yes I know we can all be critical of each airline but I am still getting insurance added to my VA bookings and I have to make sure I uncheck the box. Deception?
Deception? No. If they did the opposite there would be people complaining that they should set it up the other way. IMHO the box should probably be left unpicked though.
I had an issue the other day doing a domestic booking & the JQ website was really slow. The travel insurance box isn't ticked either way - you have to physically ticket the yes & the no yourself & I believed I'd ticked the box for the latter however I was charged for insurance! I had paid the $22.00 to earn points & SC which also had the ability to change reservations at no charge.
JQ do pretick the $18.00 box for 20kg of checked luggage which I managed to untick however IMHO it's probably a better idea for them to autoselect that one to avoid issues at the airport when pax have bags but didn't select the checked baggage box.
Moving from a bassinet is not someone randomly reassigning seats.
It isn't done until the day of departure as (for some reason) they do not know how many bassinet positions there is a requirement for (I dont understand the why here as given they know all pax details surely they should know how many lap infants they have?)
In terms of whether there is a J seat available - there has to be - if they sell 56 J seats and someone with a baby has been allocated initially 16B they just put you in 16B and the baby in 1A.
.
If 16B is an exit row it's not possible to allocate exit seats to people who have an infant in the pnr. Ditto for children as long as they've been booked as a "child" passenger type. Frequent what happens is people book the whole family with the "adult" pax type as using the title "Miss" or "Mstr" does not in itself flag the pax as a child.
It's better to have a child edit against the kids anyway as it gives the pnr a higher PCV so you'd get a better choice of seats if you were only NB or no status. Premium pax would already be able to see decent seats anyway.
As for why they can't be preselected earlier - I imagine that it's precisely because some eager person (such as ourselves
) has gone ahead an preallocated a bassinet seat despite not needing one, and once that's done the changes are handed over to airport control - who will make the change on the day, based on the priority of infant age (and of course whether the parents bother to remind them to do so as well).
Exactly. If you're WP etc you can allocate your seat the minute you've done the booking which could be weeks away where the best a non-status pax can do is call up res & request a BSCT which unlike international flights, doesn't allocate the seats in front of the bassinet but appears in the Amadeus pnr & Altea closer to departure as an SSR request. End result is the family turns up at the airport expecting to get 23JK because "we requested a bassinet at the time of booking" when in all honesty they've taken every possible step available to them to try & get it inthe firstplace.
Maybe I have been spoiled by Qantas, but it would severely annoy me to be moved out of row 3 on a DJ 737 for row 4; just like it would annoy me to be moved out of row 4 on a Qantas 73H for another row further down.
If that seem precious, then maybe I should no longer fly DJ.
Some years ago I had a Friday flight on a 737 MEL-AKL with a return the next day.
In both case I had 4C preallocated.
I was contacted about 3 hours before the Friday flight by Qantas to apologise to the fact I that I had been moved out of the pre-allocated seats and they could only offer me 4B or an exit aisle seat each way - I chose the exit aisle.¹ When checking in 90 minutes later at the MEL First check-in I was again apologised to.
Now, while that is unlikely to occur these days with the official advent of ÜWP, it illustrates the importance Qantas puts on avoiding moving elites from their pre-allocations.
¹ FWIW, I was very interested in the occupants of "my" seats - as it happened the guy was a bigwig of the ARU and was on the same flights each way - J was sold out (as he is an ex rugby player I was glad I did not take the 4B options).
You'd think the ARU ex-player would've jumped at the chance to grab the exit aisle & they could've left you where you were.
Perhaps Bob Katter
Wouldn't be him as always travels whY. Rumour has it that once when he received an op-up & asked to be moved back to whY.
The comment was not directed at any individual person. Multiple people have made comments on why is the middle seat occupied when there are free seats further back. Perhaps we have to disagree on whether that comes across as a sense of entitlement or not - but tio me it does.
You'd be surprised at how many people who already have pre-allocated an aisle or window eg in row 7, given the chance will move themselves out of that seat into the middle seats or 4B or 4E. I remember once sitting in 4F thinking that 4E was to remain vacants however the inevitable happened & the guy in the middle seat was like a kid in a candy shop & could barely contain his excitement.
