Consolidated Advance Seat Selection Rules by Airline

I ran across some issues picking seats in advance on some carriers and couldn't find a central reference, so I thought I'd create a thread we can use to document and reference the various rules. I'll start the wiki above!

I threw the ones I know off the top of my head (well, sorta) in the wiki. Ones I'm personally interested in are:

-Air China
-Asiana
-Lufthansa

I have unassigned seats in premium cabins on those flights and would like to know if I can choose them in advance, so if anyone knows, please fill out the wiki above and bump the thread! (Also, any hints such as "must call, cannot access online" would be helpful.)

Thanks jackal,

I am also interested in Air China's policy albeit for Economy class.

There are stickies and/or wikis with this info for most airlines in their respective airline forums. If you are looking for a specific airline, you will likely get more up to date, accurate, and detailed information there then in the Info Desk, which due to its setup (and inherent in the "I have xx miles and want to travel to YYY" setting) unfortunately discourages many people with expertise on specific airlines from visiting. Information Desk should not substitute people going to the appropriate forum when they have a question about a specific airline or hotel. it's a bit of a misnomer- each forum is an information desk of sorts. We now have tons of duplicate threads- here on information desk and in airline fora. Was this the point of creating this forum?

One of the purposes of this forum is cross-program comparison and discussion.

The information may be available elsewhere, but it's often not in a concise, easy-to-locate form. It isn't in the Alaska Airlines forum--I know, because I moderate that forum.

As for why I created this thread--well, I have a Star Alliance award booking coming up with five different carriers, three of whom I haven't yet found out how to select a seat on. I thought I'd save everyone else the hassle of sifting through an hour and a half's worth of search results to locate the same information. Ideally, I'd like to see at least a high-level overview of some of these types of issues and questions here in the Information Desk, making this forum serve as a sort of one-stop signpost for common issues with further, deeper discussion and analysis in each individual forum.

You're right that we haven't yet attracted the userbase of experts in this forum to be able to make that vision become a reality, but we already do have a healthy population of experienced flyers stopping by to provide input and assistance to less-experienced members, and I hope to see that continue to grow. There's a lot of information and data on FlyerTalk, and the purpose of this forum is to make that information accessible--kind of like the reference librarian's desk at your local library...or the information desk at your local airport (hence the name).

That all said, how this forum ends up evolving and working is still very much a work in progress.

Fwiw, I was able to choose seats for all three, Air China, Asiana and Lufthansa, for UA award bookings in business class. I don't know the official policy, but think I just went to their respective websites and put in their confirmation code.

At least for F, OZ pretty much doesn't allow you to pick a seat. Just an auto assignment in one of the middle pairs. I called OZ once and was only able to select a seat for the shorter J segment ICN-BKK

Thai website gave me the option to select seats for my Air China segment but it failed. I believe a phone call is necessary to assign a seat in most cases

EVA, the seat selection rules are the same for Elite (Y+) as you have already listed for Royal Laurel. (100 days out, bulkhead/front row seats reserved for statused FF members until day of flight, etc.)

I don't know about regular economy, since I've only flown J and Y+, but I'd imagine its the same.

I added an easy one - Southwest.

Can you elaborate on how you did this on the Air China website? For the life of me, I could not figure out where or how to put in the confirmation code.

That is my issue, too.

Hmm, I could be remembering wrong. I'll try to recreate what I did, but I do recall it wasn't straight forward. I ended of not taking the Air China flights but fairly certain I had a seat assignment without calling in.

Its possible you were able to select Air China seats from within one of the other carriers websites. Some of the carriers systems are linked up pretty well. I pulled up my TG reservation and it gave me the option to select seats on Asiana (shares same record locator) and Air China (different record locator). Although it fails when i hit save.

Asiana seems to block almost all the first class seats, most of the business class seats and about 1/2 of economy seats. i didn't have much luck when i called their reservations phone number.

BTW thanks to whoever added the formatting to make the wiki easier to read. i tried a few things but never saved as they weren't very pretty

Well, booked this year's trip a few weeks ago, and the 100 day limit appears to be gone. Selected my seat at booking way more than 100 days out.

I noticed that recently too but it was for a shorter flight though PEK-TPE for May 2015 so i didn't really think about it.

My flight included two transpacs 30 days apart.