This is a worked example of one flight, just below 48 hours from departure, BA1321, Newcastle to Heathrow, it departs at 06:00 hrs. I've chosen this since the flight is quite busy, and it does illustrate the benefits and disadvantages of Theoretical Seating. Being a domestic service there is only one class of seating, but the general principles apply to other flights too.

For Gold/Emerald passengers, at around 10:00 hrs, the seatmap showed these options.



Which isn't bad, it gives some good seats (e.g. 1A) and some evidence of seat blocking at the front, so long as not too many Gold passengers reserve at the last moment. Initially no rear seats were shown, some came up a few hours later.

For Silver/Sapphire, at pretty much the same time, only these seats were available:



So much further back, but with a chance of a blocked seat next to them. If booked for 2 passengers, a number of middle seats also opened up, e.g. in row 22. Before T-72 Silvers would have had access to row 6, in fact it looks like they have blocked out 2 and a half rows fully (rows 6, 7 and part of 8), including the middle, so anyone in these seats could get themselves more space, so long as they went further back. At this point Gold cardholders were not offered these seats. A few hours later, when some of the front seats got allocated then these seats were offered up.

For Bronze/Ruby/Blue and no status passengers there was just one option:



Quite a good option, an exit row seat which would be free to Bronze and a £10 fee to Blue. This was for a Plus fare, so normally there is some free seating available at T48 but that didn't really materialise on this fairly full flight. This exit row seat was NOT offered to Silvers, or indeed to Golds, at the time, but it was offered a few hours later and then was snapped up.

In ExpertFlyer there is an ability to add your BAEC number in Your Account. This then gives more information on the options open to you and whether you will have a blocked seat next to you. Without a BAEC number attached you see this:


which isn't entirely helpful.

But with a Gold/Emerald cardholder added to EF then you see this:

which was accurate at the time (the back seats had opened up for Golds when this screenshot was taken, and 12C had been taken).

Now there are some glitches in this. I think the Silver cardholders should have had access to the Exit row seat, I can see why maybe a Gold cardholder would not have access since they had other options. There are swings and roundabouts, it's actually quite complex in operation, and changes rapidly. But clearly a benefit to Gold cardholders overall.

The working outs are in this thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...time-only.html