Cathay Pacific Asia Miles - How to get CX business seat assignments?

I have a reservation to fly CX SF-Hong Kong-SF in business class, leaving in a week and returning in three weeks. But the CX CSRs won't provide specific seat assignments and in fact tell me that I possibly won't get the assignments until check-in. This is contrary to any prior business class experience I've had with Singapore, United, Lufthansa, etc. Am I missing something here? My reservation was made by my travel agent, in D class, but I've always been able to secure seat assignments under those circumstances even before ticketing. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect the problem here is that the flights are overbooked and that, at best, I may end up sitting in the middle seat of the middle section.

Does anyone have any advice on quickly securing the seat assignments? (Otherwise I'll probably book and fly with United or Singapore.) I'm AA Platinum, if that makes any difference.

Thanks for any help

Possibility is that "assignable" seats are all gone.

HOWEVER, Just checked at itn.com and looked up seatmap for July 7th on CX873. There are still window seats available for grab. You can check for other dates.

Just call CX Res again, and request seat assignment. Should be done.

I've never had a problem getting seating assignments from 6 months out till the date of departure. :confused:

Perhaps try ringing local CX reservations?

Thunderroad, please advise us of your exact date of departure and we can look at the situation.

In certain circumstances, all advance seat reservations have been taken up and there might be some seats left which are blocked off for airport release or can only be assigned by internet check-in 48 hours prior to departure.

Inventory Control used to be able to release the seats to members of Asiamiles or the Marco Polo Club but lately even Diamond members have been unable to request the release of such seats. So if that is the case, then you'd really have to wait till departure time to get seats released.

If your travel agent booked the ticket, why didn't he/she get the seat selection? And that you had to call CX yourself?

Thanks for the replies, advice and, to Guy Betsy, for the offer of help. An email to Customer Service in HK did the trick and got me the seat assignments, plus two follow-up calls from the US Cathay office just to make sure everything was OK.

As for GB's good questions about my travel agent, the short answer is that it is time for me to get a new travel agent!

Thanks again.