I saw an article today about Delta allowing free changes now on basic economy fares. I understand there's no in advance seat selection. But do they allow you to select a seat at check in ? Or does their system auto assign seats at check in? If they assign do they seat together the people in the confirmation-reservation?
I am a Plat Delta flyer (I average a bit more than 50K miles/year in a "normal" year), but haven't flown on BE fares, so this is what I understand from my own travels in Main/C+/First, and reading flyertalk and watching how the boarding process works at the gate. TL;DR: if it is important to you to sit together, buy a Main Cabin fare.
First, they do not assign BE customers on the same PNR together. So, expect your initial assignments to be scattered. Once you have been checked in and been assigned a seat, the Delta app will let you choose any other open seat in your section of the plane (Main Cabin for BE customers) from that point until some point after boarding begins---I can't tell exactly when it happens, but at one point before the boarding door closes the seating chart is "frozen" and you can't make any more changes.
So,
if you are assigned a seat at check-in and
if there are open seats together, then you have a fighting chance.
The second part is rare: Delta has gotten very very good at forecasting load, and the flights I am on are nearly always within a seat or two of being full. But, that's not the worst of it, because the first part might not happen either. It appears by watching the boarding process that some (many? all?) of the BE customers are not assigned to seats at check-in, but instead put on the standby list. The standby list isn't seated until the flight closes for check-ins and after upgrades clear. Those standby lists were in the
dozens of people for the last few DL flights I was on, and all of them were seated. It's hard to believe that there are
that many people who missed an earlier flight/wanted to get out earlier than scheduled/etc. The only other place they might be coming from is BE.
BE customers can buy seats seven days in advance, and that would be a way to be on a BE fare and still guarantee seating together. But at that point you are probably within a few dollars of Main Cabin, at which point you should just book that.
I have avoided BE fares because my status allows me to select C+/Exit row seats without additional cost. However, I expect to lose status because my business travel is going to be severely curtailed even after the pandemic closures are mostly behind us. Once that happens, I will probably be willing to book BE fares for flights <2hrs when I am flying alone. In those cases, I won't mind being in the middle quite so much. If I am flying with my partner, we tend to book aisle seats across from each other, so I'll still be in Main for those.
