A funny thing happened on the way to Athens
On a trip from Denver to Athens, I encountered a customer service failure that I'm certain occurs far too often on bookings that involve partner airlines.
I had booked my own ticket -- Denver to Munich and on to Athens -- on the United website using MileagePlus points. The leg connecting Denver and Munich is a United-Lufthansa joint venture and codeshare route on Lufthansa aircraft.
For my girlfriend, Holly, we booked the ticket via the Lufthansa website because it was less expensive, and we paid a seat selection fee.
On United, per its policies, I was able to select a seat adjacent to Holly without paying a fee.
After airport check-in (I wasn't able to check in remotely with United despite booking with them, but that's a separate integration problem for another day), I saw that I was not sitting in the seat I had selected. Instead, I had been moved from an aisle to a middle seat for the nearly 10-hour flight. And I was no longer anywhere near Holly.
When I attempted to rectify the situation at the gate, the Lufthansa agent suggested I call United. On that call, United told me Lufthansa would have to deal with the situation, as it had made the change and was operating the flight. I was patched through to a Lufthansa agent who explained that I had been moved because I had not paid to select a seat, as is Lufthansa policy. My seat had been assigned to someone who had.
United ultimately gave me 5,000 Mileage Plus points for my inconvenience.
"Seat assignments can change unexpectedly due to aircraft swaps, schedule changes or other unforeseen circumstances. Still, I understand how disappointing it can be not to sit in the seat you requested," a customer service agent wrote to me.
Airlines and airline alliances often talk about seamlessness when discussing partnerships. It's a major topic of conversation among the Star, SkyTeam and Oneworld alliances each June when I go to the IATA Annual General Meeting. Each aspires to make cross-partner bookings and multi-airline itineraries as easy to manage for customers as when they are dealing only with a single carrier.
Few airline partnerships are more substantial than the one between United and Lufthansa. The two global carriers were founding members of the Star Alliance in 1997. And since 2013 they have been transatlantic joint-venture partners, collaborating on scheduling, marketing and operations. So, when a partnership as robust as that one can't properly work together on something as basic as seat assignments, it makes me realize how far the airline world is from achieving true cross-partner seamlessness.
For another perspective, I spoke with airline industry technology analyst Henry Harteveldt. I wondered why United would present a seat map with free seat selection if Lufthansa isn't committed to honoring those selections.
Harteveldt said that in this example, the issue is a commercial one rather than a technological one. Though he mostly blamed Lufthansa for not fulfilling the seat assignment booked by its partner, he also said that both airlines shoulder responsibility.
"If the two airlines' business policies are not aligned, they clearly need to sit down and say, 'How are we going to manage this,'" Harteveldt said. "It shouldn't be a complex process. It's not like two countries negotiating tariffs."
He added that the situation I encountered is just one example of the fallacy that airlines offer seamless travel with their codeshare and alliance partners.
Unfortunately, I'm inclined to agree.
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The Potomac River collision in January 2025 was the first major incident on U.S. soil in 16 years, but to a lot of people, that 16-year stretch isn't good enough. In 1956, mass air travel was not yet fully realized—the accident then, while tragic, somehow feels explainable. But today millions of people fly every day, every hour, and helicopters aren't supposed to crash into planes. The investigation of that crash will take a while. But whatever the conclusion, the crash happened. Yes, we have vastly better technology now. But inexplicably, we somehow don't have enough air traffic controllers, not even close, nor do we have the required technology to do this job in their absence. As in the terrible quiet moments that followed the Grand Canyon crash that no one saw, it's as if it never happened, so little have we learned from it. And so the questions haven't changed: Are we so smart? Have we figured this out? Will it happen again, and again, and again? 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