Europe trip begins with a hiccup

What a bummer for you!! Has happened to me too. Hope you enjoy your new route and airlines!!

At least they re-booked you and didn’t leave you with a canceled flight and no replacement. Hopefully this will be the last snafu of your trip.

Enjoy Berlin—-it is a vibrant city and really nice in spring, at least in my experience.

We are within the online check in window but LH won't even assign me seats because "the flight is under airport control"

That's an interesting Sky Team to Star Alliance jump. Who is the "they" that rebooked your flight(s)? Where were you starting from?

Tickets were bought from DL, open jaw SFO-AMS-BER on KLM metal and LIS-BOS-SFO on DL metal.

KLM on their own rebooked on LH 24 hours before departure just as I was starting an online check in and now everything is opaque until I go the airport.

Only got one of my seat assignments that I paid for because of cancellations and plane changes. Certainly is frustrating.

Hopefully all the rain in Berlin has stopped for the moment. Enjoy Berlin, do some Berlin Walks, enjoy the transportation and go see the Reichstag dome.

Pls keep us posted regarding your experience. Good luck!

@heather

We do have morning reservations for the Reichstag Dome and are hoping for a walk-in entry at sunset too.

@pat

Will definitely report on the experience with Lufthansa at the airport. The aircraft from SFO to FRA is a 747 which I thought was no longer being flown.

Lufthansa is still flying them. I love that airplane and was sad to see British Airways drop them from the fleet. We had reservations on one for our March 2022 trip, but the plane was changed to a 777 after booking. And then we canceled that trip anyway. So we missed our last chance to fly on a 747. I don’t feel inclined to switch to Lufthansa just to fly a 747 again; we are too tied into the One World team.

Since it was KLM, not Delta, that switched your flight, you should to be safe check that the return leg on Delta is still intact. Sometimes missing the scheduled outbound flight cancels the return automatically—we had that happen even within the same airline (Alaska) when we did a same-day change to a different flight. The gate agent who made the change (which we requested) did not take the step of protecting the return flight. We were able to get it sorted out eventually, but it would have been easier to check on that at the time the change was made.

Got to the airport early and the agent assigned us seats though aisle+middle in the center 4-across portion rather than our previous window+aisle. She told us that the flight was full and that we were lucky that we did not have to wait for a gate agent to assign us seats :-)

The DL app is still showing our return segments!

And I've flown on 747s a lot, starting with my first international flight on Pan Am 1

At the gate, I looked up our seats on Seatguru and noticed that we were in the very last row and the seats were marked "limited recline". (In hindsight, I should have done this at check in but would have been awkward firing up my laptop). The gate agent was able to move us up to a row with reclining seats but we are no longer sitting together.

Maybe we can get someone to switch. The adventure continues :-)

Someone was kind enough to switch seats so that my wife and I could sit together SFO-FRA. The 747 was showing it age with some things broken.

Now at Frankfurt Airport where we are seated separately again on a full flight for the leg to BER. It is a short full flight and we are not even going to try to get someone to switch.

I'm sorry this happened to you. It infuriates me that airlines can do whatever they want as long as they don't crash. Paying for seat assignments is their latest scam, but who wants to risk not having them? There have been numerous reports of altercations when people ask others to swap seats so they can sit with their spouse or children. How can airlines be allowed to seat young children(including toddlers!) away from a parent?

I wanted to close with some good news. As I went through the turnstile at the gate at FRA to board the flight to BER, it printed out a slip of paper with a new seat assignment which was next to my wife.

Sometimes things work out :-)

That is good. And now May you have smooth sailing, so to speak, the rest of your trip.