Flying back from Costa Rica this week and I paid almost $200 for exit row seats on both legs of the return, selected and confirmed two months ago. I’m 7 feet tall, so this wasn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a necessity.
Day before check-in, the seats disappear from the app. Figured it was just Southwest IT being Southwest IT. Then check-in day comes, app won’t let me check in, seats still gone. At that point I knew something was wrong.
At the counter, turns out both exit row seats I paid for were reassigned to someone else. I literally showed them the emails with the exact seat numbers I purchased. No explanation. No accountability. Just “someone else has them now” and “there’s nothing we can do.”
I did eventually get other extra legroom seats, but the stress of thinking I’d be stuck in a standard seat for hours was brutal. For a system that’s supposed to add certainty, this did the exact opposite.
Not a great first impression of assigned seating.
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