Originally Posted by
The Narwhal
To me the odd thing is if you book a rewards ticket on JX through AS, you can pick your seat right away if you go to JX's website. Not sure why buying a cash ticket would work differently.
The difference is the JX rules for paid seating. Any ticket booked on as.com that books into a 'free seat included' fare class will allow you to assign the seat. But only JX-ticketed will allow you to pay for seat selection.
So apparently the award booking class gives you free seating (but note that there are no business class fares that do NOT allow free seat selection, so valid award data point would only be for PE/economy).