Originally Posted by
xenole
If I go to pay by cash, I can select a seat.
If I use Avios, I get the personal details page and then the payment page. No seat selection option anywhere during the booking process.
Yes, but once the booking is done then you can do the seating via BAEC MMB in the usual way.
The seat selection for cash tickets is actually quite new, just over a year I think, and it was a mechanism for upselling, given that most travellers are not in BAEC, and would typically not think to use MMB thereafter, though the seat selection worked well for everyone. Before this change many passengers were simply unaware they could buy their seat selection, hence it being added into the process.
The booking mechanism for Avios is still effectively the previous version, since by definition everyone is a BAEC member, and seat selection is relatively easy in MMB.