Do you have any rights when an airline changes your seat assignment? That’s what Jay Libove wanted to know after he lost his assigned seat on a recent flight from Philadelphia to Barcelona.

His airline changed his plane — and his seat assignment — twice without telling him. 

“The last one was the worst,” says Libove, an IT consultant who lives in Barcelona. “I had carefully chosen an aisle seat near the front of the cabin, and they re-seated me in the last row of the cabin in a window seat.”

Although no one systematically tracks the number of these switches or the passengers affected by them, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that they’re occurring more frequently. (They tend to happen a lot when demand suddenly changes.) 

“When an airline switches planes, passengers often lose their previously chosen seats,” explains Vlad Polyanskiy, chief marketing officer at FlightRefunder, a company that helps passengers negotiate compensation from airlines. 

He says the two most common issues related to these plane swaps, also called equipment changes, are being downgraded to a lower class or losing your specific reserved seat.

“These changes in themselves create considerable stress for passengers, especially those who intended to travel for work or have special needs,” he adds. “Passengers are frequently unaware of their rights and do not receive compensation.”

What are your rights when you lose your chosen airline seat?

You have some rights if you lose your seat, but probably not as many as you thought.

Airlines aren’t required to notify you or to get your approval if your assigned seat has changed.

In North America, if you get downgraded to a lower class of service, your airline typically must refund the price difference between the ticket you purchased and the lower class you were reassigned to. 

In the EU and UK, getting downgraded means the airline has to compensate you anywhere from 30 percent to 75 percent of the price you paid for the ticket, depending on the flight distance.

If it’s just a seat change, but you’re in the same class of service, the requirements are different. In Canada, the EU and UK, if you paid extra for the seat assignment, you’re entitled to a refund and possibly compensation, depending on the airline’s policy.

In the U.S., a change of seats within the same class of service means you get a refund of your seat reservation fee.

Libove’s seat swap happened within the same class of service, and the price of a seat assignment was included in his premium economy seat, so American Airlines could make the change without notifying him, and it owed him nothing.

How to get compensation for a switched seat

You don’t have many rights when an airline changes your seat. Getting an airline to honor those rights can be an even bigger challenge, say professionals.

Whether you’re downgraded to a lower class or your seat assignment is changed, it’s essential to act quickly.

• Contact the airline as soon as possible to get reimbursement. Typically, the longer you wait, the harder it will be to get a refund.

• Always keep a record of your booking, including receipts and seat details. Don’t assume your airline will retain these records.

• Know your rights. Airlines may offer vouchers or other compensation. But remember, you may be entitled to a full refund, particularly if the changes caused a significant delay.

Speaking of which, there’s a growing consensus that air travelers don’t have enough rights when it comes to seat changes.

Do we need a law on seat changes?

Consider what happened to John Udemezue, who lost his seat assignment on a recent flight from New York to Chicago. “It just disappeared,” says Udemezue, a digital marketing entrepreneur from New York. He received a new seat, but not the one he had wanted.

“I think travelers should push for clearer policies and fair treatment,” he says.

Airlines are legally shielded by their contracts of carriage — the fine-print terms that most people skim over when they book a ticket. 

“In those contracts, airlines like to include language that gives them the right to change seat assignments and change planes without notice,” explains David Gammill, a lawyer based in Los Angeles. “Legally, there’s not much in federal law that entitles you to keep a particular seat. It doesn’t matter if you paid extra for more legroom or a spot by the window. That ticket buys a preference, not a guarantee.”

The best solution would be for airlines to voluntarily commit to notifying their customers of any seat changes. They could do so on the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Customer Service Dashboard. While this wouldn’t be legally binding, it would represent a step toward improving customer service.

Passengers need more control of their seat assignments

Ideally, there would also be a mechanism for accepting or rejecting a new seat. No one likes to be blindsided with a new seat assignment, and the technology exists to implement a system that would allow airlines to get consent from their passengers when there’s a seat change.

Above all, there should be a system for refunding seat assignment fees when airlines switch planes. Last year, the DOT announced a new rule that refunds should be automatic. But, based on what I’ve been hearing from airline passengers, it hasn’t worked out that way. Passengers report that when airlines reseat them, they keep the fees because they’re still in a “preferred” seat (read: not a middle seat).

If airlines can’t commit to being up front about their seating changes, maybe we need new regulations. But we should give airlines an opportunity to do the right thing on their own first. And now they know what the right thing is.