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Where you sit matters

Good seats open up on fully booked flights as you get closer to departure. Why? People get upgraded or change their flights. When that happens, good seats - seats with legroom and a view become open. Of course a good seat does not stay open long, and the first ones to claim them get them. It would be impractical for a person to call American every 5 minutes and ask if a better seat has opened up, but that is an ideal task for our servers!

This tool is a great way to switch yourself from a substandard coach seat to a better coach seat. If an upgrade becomes available all the better, but if not you are protected from a really bad coach seat when you use this tool.

Let's lay out the scenario: You just bought a seat on American Airlines for a flight next week, but the seat you were assigned was 31E, the middle seat in the back of the plane next to the bathroom, or worse yet - no seat assignment at all.
You can probably deal with it if you just have a 1 hour flight, but what about going to Europe or Asia during the summer? What about a cross-country trip? Does 2-12 hours spent in the middle seat next to the bathroom sound less than appealing? Would that one bulkhead seat that fully doubles your legroom be nice? If you think it would, read on.

When you input your data below, we will check for a seat that matches your preferences until 1 hour prior to departure. If your flight is more than 3 days off, we check every 4 hours. If it is less than 24 hours till flight time we check every 10 minutes. At any time if a seat you want opens up we will snag it for you and email you a confirmation.

Things to be aware of:

• This works with only one person per reservation / record locator
• This is only for American Airlines at this point. When out of beta, other airlines will be supported.
• When you enter your data, a seatmap of your flight will be displayed. You can choose seatguru.com "green" seats, window or aisle seats, or enter specific seat numbers you want if available.
• This only works for people with a checkinsooner membership. Guest access of this tool is not supported.
• This only works with coach seats