Given a travel related situation, and given a specific question about the situation, summarize the question into a title

[EX Q]: My family and I are flying to New Zealand (AKL) from the USA (LAX) in just over a week.  We booked 7 seats (in a single booking), but when I check the American Airlines website it says we don't have seats assigned, and recommends I select seats.  The 7 of us are Mum and Dad (my wife and I), 4 kids (16, 14, 13, 5 years old), and our friend.

When I go to select seats there is only two areas that have a block of enough open seats for 7 people to at least sit close together, however more than half of these seats cost (approx $86-$120 USD each).

Now we don't care where on the plane we sit, we just want to sit together as a family, but can't afford to pay another ~$500 USD to select specific seats.

Are we likely to be seated together anyway if we check-in together?  Or are we just going to get random open seats?

Our flight back is on United and we were able to select seats together on the United website without incurring any extra charge.

Here is a screenshot of some of the available seats, to show what we've got to work with currently.



[EX A]: How to seat family of seven together on long-haul flight?

[EX Q]: Until early October, the Azuon tool was worth the subscription fee to me.  But it has been non-functional since then.  Former use: put in an entire country for origin, box populates with all the airports in the country. Same for destination. Put in earliest date, latest date (any two). Click “search” and wait five minutes or more and see a table of five hundred flights with accurate fares. Pick one and book it. NOW, it says NOBODY flies from USA to Taiwan or Europe or Korea, and only Southwest flies within North America. Skyscanner, for comparison, makes you pick one origin and destination before estimating prices, and then a specific date to find the real price.

Anyone familiar with Azuon and aware of something similar?

Yes, Skyscanner is similar, but not close in value, primarily because it makes you select a single origin and destination before it shows prices, and those prices are always very inaccurate estimates.

azair.com is closer, but it doesn't know some airports exist, its user-interface is clumsy, and it often complains that some problem prevented it returning results.

Updates: Azuon has made some bug fixes and some of the problems have gone away.  But it still said "no fares found" for any Korean airport to any US airport for the entire month of March.  As for AzAir.com, yesterday it offered me a dozen flights USA to Spain for $1.99 !! (Of course, they all got error messages from the actual airline.) 

Well, I guess the answer is either go back to the old method of spending a hundred dollars worth of time to save a hundred fifty; or just hire someone like chimpando.  I may give the latter a test run.

[EX A]: Are there any alternatives to Azuon?

[EX Q]: Two questions actually:


Are US dollars widely accepted in Jamaica? For example if I'm in a small town buying a pack of gum, would they accept my US dollars?
In Jamaica, do they refuse to accept your US dollars, if they don't look brand new and crisp, as is done in certain countries? 


[EX A]:
US dollars in Jamaica