a couple of comments about advance seat reservation with CX...

Celestar340: "only Sapphires and Emeralds can have advance seat selection done"...I think, according to the published oneworld benefits, all oneworld elite members, including Ruby's, have "preferred seating", which probably means advance seat reservation with CX...and not just Sapphires and Emeralds...

However, last week I was trying to make an advance seat reservation for one of my CX flights...they know I'm Marco Polo and I said I want an aisle seat...but then I was told the best available aisle seat is 61D...first row in economy is 30 and last row is 70, so 61 is really much closer to the back than to the front...and, given that it's a widebodies and has 4 aisle seats per row...I don't think there're so many Marco Polo's to fill all the aisle seats, given that they said in total 13% of CX's revenue are from Marco Polo members (who I think usually fly premium classes or pay full-fare, making the number of Marco Polo members less than 10% on an average flight, I guess)...

So, I asked the reservation agent, whether it's still true that only Marco Polo members (and oneworld elites) can have advance seat reservation...I was told, "well, in fact we are really not that strict in enforcing that rule, basically everyone who has ticketed can reserve any seat that is available"...I got the same reply from two reservation agents...one of them told me that the advantage of being a Marco Polo member is that we can reserve a seat even before we issue the ticket, when simply making a reservation...but, that doesn't seem to be what they've been advertising...and doesn't seem to be a very big difference for me...

I agree, that all people should be able to reserve seats in advance (because I've seen so many cases with CX before where family members couldn't sit together because they didn't reserve seats in advance)...but if they really advertise it as an "benefit" of being an elite member, they'd better enforce it...or just simply don't say it's only available to elites...

In fact, I'd like to see something more like what other airlines are doing, for example, reserving the first few rows in economy for elites and not filling the middle seats in those rows unless it's absolutely necessary...and opening up the rest for selection by others...