Originally Posted by
Darren
My experience is not to trust one airline to choose seats for another. AA and BA you can do online without much effort. JAL you have to call, but you can see what seats are available before calling. Malev you have to call and I don't recall seeing anywhere to check prior to calling. Cathay and Finnair I just cannot recall since it's been a while. Royal Jordanian I have not flown. My recommendation is to deal with each separately. They can look up your reservations using your flight and last name. Ask them for your PNR when you call. Even if you can't do anything with the reservation, you can usually use the PNR to look up the reservation on that carrier's website, which will be the most accurate.
Thanks for that. My experience with AA assigning seats have been rather spot on, except that it'd only become "requested" with AY rather than confirmed. I had to ring up AY to actually assign them. Of course I do periodic checks on the various tools to make sure that the seats have actually been assigned.
I'd usually get the PNRs of the other airlines' from AA after the reservation is made, they're usually more than happy to give them out. Have done this with both the regular reservations line and the ATW desk.
Also was it just me or do any changes made by AA take a fair while to transfer across to JL's systems? I had AA changed a JL flight, but JL's website was still showing the old one and neither could the people on the phone see the new flight - it took about 24 hours or so for the change to be reflected.