They're blocked from pre-assignment by the airline, likely for use for passengers on basic economy fares (or who for other reasons don't have advance seat assignments), so that the airline can still ultimately seat families together.
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It means you can't choose this seat because the airline has blocked it for some reason. Usually, it's because it may be chosen ony by an airline's elite member or you have to pay more to choose it, or perhaps someone else is already sitting there.
It means the flight's overbooked and you didn't make the “defnite” list, probably because others have either paid for seat assignments or because they have longer history with the airline. In these circumstances, if everyone with an assigned seat shows up, you will not be able to fly and will be offered compensation.
With Basic Economy, you'll automatically be assigned a seat before boarding, and you won't be able to change your seat once it's assigned. Advance seat assignments may be available for purchase during booking and up until check-in opens.
Many airlines provide information such as seat maps that are accessible via their apps and websites before the day of travel. These maps will show you the layout of every seat on the plane and whether it's been booked or not.
More often, you'll need to be a pretty spontaneous traveler to catch these deals – seats are usually only bookable for travel in the next few weeks, if not days. Many airlines follow this pattern, hoping to fill up some seats that might otherwise fly empty.
Overbooking is how airlines ensure that there are no available seats when a flight departs. So they sell more tickets in advance than there are seats on the plane. The point of all this is to ensure that the plane is full when it takes off, because empty seats are a financial burden for airlines.
Put simply, not all rail operators offer seat reservations. Their carriages don't have specific letters and you won't find any seat numbers, either. If there's no specific seat reserved on your ticket, then you can sit in any seat in the class of accommodation that your ticket is for.
If overcrowding becomes intense, first class can be “declassified”, i.e. opened up to all passengers, regardless of their tickets. But there is no automatic right to occupy first class. Ad hoc declassification typically happens after other trains have been cancelled or seriously delayed.
A strategy that travelers have been trying for years to varying degrees of success is the middle seat trick — when checking in online, two people traveling together will each select the aisle and window seats in a three-seat row and hope that the middle seat remains open.
A parent who purchases airline tickets for a family should receive a guarantee from the airline that it will seat the parent and child together without fees or a last-minute scramble at the gate or having to ask other passengers to give up their seat to allow the parent and child to sit together.
Sometimes, when an airline asks for volunteers to give up their seats and fly on a different flight, there are not enough volunteers. When this occurs, the airline will select passengers to give up their seats. This is called “involuntary denied boarding” or “bumping.”
Is overbooking legal in Europe? Yes.The air carriers in the EU countries can overbook flights and trade more seats than they have available on the aircraft. If your flight is overbooked and you are denied boarding, you may ask for airline passenger compensation.
When you're asked by a flight attendant or gate agent to change seats, it's usually to help families sit together, allow caregivers to sit next to patients, or accommodate an air marshal or other airline employee.
More seats tend to fill the closer to the departure date. As more tickets sell for any given flight, the demand increases creating a jump in ticket prices. Sometimes for less popular destinations or if there is an unusually large amount of cancelations, prices may drop for flights in order to fill the seats.