More seat assignment woes

Today's prize of most idiotic software design or implementation goes to...

Rearden Personal Travel Assistant.

This is the new frontend that replaced Cliqbooks (which was pretty retarded in its own ways) to allow me to book travel with our corporate travel agency.

It has this cool "feature" that if you tell it you prefer, say, aisle seats, and then you book a flight that doesn't have aisles available, it keeps checking for you to see if your preference opens up. Unfortunately, somehow it can't see what seat I actually have once I change it on the airline's own website.

So, a couple of days ago, a fairly full flight from Boston to SFO on Wednesday suddenly showed an aisle seat in EXIT ROW open up. I immediately grabbed it.

8am sharp the next morning, the Rearden Assistant moved me to an available middle seat... because well, it couldn't see where I was, and I guess determined that it must be a non-aisle seat so it moved me to the only thing that was available ... a middle seat. Thanks!

This evening thinking I was crazy after moving myself to a different open aisle exit row seat that opened up earlier this evening (the one I was moved out of was gone now) I then called AA to ask them about this. They confirmed that my travel agent moved me out of 9D into 25B and she confirmed I was definitely showing as being in 9C now, and I'm willing to bet that tomorrow at 8am sharp the system will try to move me to my preferred aisle seat and probably force me back into 25E or some such...

Sadly, AA has no way to lock my "travel agent" out of my record. Sadly, there is no preference I can set in Rearden that says "I prefer you LEAVE MY GODDAMN SEAT ASSIGNMENT ALONE". :(

airline idiocy

The biggest idiocy of our day and age are "direct" flights.

In case you don't know, a direct flight is not a non-stop flight, so you still have to land somewhere, gather your crap, go to another gate, get back on a plane, but it's called a "direct" instead of a connecting flight because you get the same flight number on the first and second legs.

In every other way it's different from a connecting flight in many ways the airline gets to screw you.

Like making you reserve the same seat on both legs (one not available or only middles seats happen to be available for both? Too bad - you only get one boarding pass). Like not clearing your upgrade unless both legs have availability at the same time. Like giving you mileage for the non-stop even if you happened to have flown more actual miles. Like not keeping the same plane, gate or even terminal and certainly not waiting for you if your incoming is late (you figured you couldn't miss the second leg of a one-stop, didn't you?).

Amazing how easily they can suddenly split your ticket into two when they want to give away your seat for the second leg!