Due to the high volume of aircraft changes required on certain British Airways routes, pre-seating is not available in all classes of travel. Below are the details of which routes or classes of travel are not available for pre-seating.

Pre-seating is available on all routes in our First, Club World, World Traveller Plus and World Traveller cabins.
Please note: Only a certain percentage of seating is available for pre-allocation in the above cabins as seats are required to be held back for airport check-in. Please see note at the bottom of this answer.

Euro Traveller (our European leisure product)
Pre-seating in Euro Traveller is not available on any route at anytime.

UK Domestic
Pre-seating is available on the following UK domestic flights for Premier, Gold or Silver Executive Club members only (or oneworld equivalent cardholders), or any passenger travelling on fully flexible fares: London Heathrow and Gatwick to/from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester. Newcastle pre-seating is available from/to Heathrow only.

Important: Pre-seating is not available on any flight due to depart within 24hours - from this point pre-seating control is handled by the airport of departure.
Any customers wanting to pre-assign themselves seats at this point will have to do so as part of our Online Check-in functionality - details of which can be found if you click here.


Note:
You may find that you are not able to assign yourself seat numbers on your flight because the remaining seats have been reserved for airport check-in purposes. In this situation, your seat numbers will allocated as part of the normal check-in process, however if you are a ba.com registered Executive Club member you can use our Online Check-in facility to choose your seat 24 hours before you fly. Non-Executive Club members who are registered on ba.com can use this system 12 hours before they fly.
Further information on our Online Check-in product can be found if you click here.

As a point of information, a number of seats are blocked for special reasons:
Exit seats are blocked as Airport staff are required by law to actually see the people given emergency exit seats. This is to ensure that they can assist in an emergency. Therefore, these seats can only be assigned on departure.
Bulkhead seats are held for passengers travelling with infants requiring bassinets or medical passengers.
Airport staff also require seats held back for downgrades, deportees, stretcher cases, sky flyers, Groups, passengers with extra seats, wheelchair passengers, Queens Messengers or any last minute Premier, Gold or Silver cardholders.

Of course, if any of these types of seats are still available when you check in, we will be glad to assign them to you upon request.

We needed to limit our advance seating in order to relieve problems experienced at our airport check-in desks. The new arrangements will provide greater availability of seats on day of departure for those requiring special attention, such as families with children, groups or elderly passengers.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

To see some typical British Airways aircraft interior seating layouts, please click here.

Note: These seat plans are provided purely as a guideline and are subject to change at any time - the aircraft that you travel on might be configured differently.

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Nice to know the hold seats for downgrades, deportees and the Queens messenger!