I’m in transit at the moment and only have a couple of minutes to quickly re-post what UA Insider announced today on the forums. United will reconfigure all CRJ-700s by reducing the allocation of Economy Plus seats, a move which will increase overall capacity in the rear cabin to 70 (up from 66). I’ve always felt the E+/E- ratio on this aircraft was a bit off.

Here are the details and seat map change implications:

As some of you may have heard, over the next few months we’re reconfiguring the cabins of our entire United Express CRJ-700 fleet. United First will continue to have six seats (yes, with similar pitch and recline), Economy Plus will move from 32 to 16 seats, and United Economy will increase from 28 to 48 seats, such that total capacity will increase to 70, from the current 66. This is the same configuration as our Embraer 170s, and the same in Economy Plus/Economy as our forthcoming Embraer 175s.

As part of this process, we’re renumbering (and in some cases “re-lettering”) the rows across all of these aircraft, not only to accommodate the change in capacity, but also to standardize the seat map configurations across operating carriers (SkyWest, GoJet and Mesa).

If you’re booked on a CRJ-700 operating on or after September 25, here’s what you need to know:

• Starting this weekend, united.com will display a new seat map for all SkyWest and GoJet CRJ-700 flights. To minimize the impact of last-minute aircraft changes, it will display Rows 4 – 7 of Economy Plus as “blocked”. In other words, we’ll show the same number of Economy Plus seats available, whether or not the flight is eventually operated by a new configuration aircraft. Changes to Mesa CRJ-700 seat maps will happen at a later date.
• Already booked in rows 4-7 on one of these flights? We’ll do our best to automatically re-accommodate you into a similar seat in Economy Plus.
• The seat map will be updated closer to the day of departure, when we assign a specific aircraft to the flight. If the aircraft hasn’t been reconfigured, Economy Plus rows 4-7 will open up for selection.

The seat map updates are rolling out as we speak, so please pardon any dust you see over the next day or two :-). Over the next few days, we’ll also send emails to customers advising them to check seat assignments before departure. However I wanted you to have consolidated information here, as well.

– Follow Darren Booth on Twitter, @FrequentlyFlyin, for more airline, hotel and travel industry news, reviews and opinions.