What does the 'Preferred seating' benefit mean?
 

I'm just a lowly QF Silver, trying to get a good economy domestic seat. The only technique I know of is to use online checkin at T-24 hours. Or, even better, checkin for a same-day return on the outbound at T-24 hours as well as the return at say T-34 hours.

The last few times I've gotten an appropriate sequence number (1 or 2) but the available seatmap was very meagre indeed. On 738s, all windows taken, all but 1 or 2 aisle seats taken.

How on earth did those passengers get their seat assignments? Is there a way to choose earlier? What does 'Preferred seating' mean anyway?

Because they have better status than you, on routes like SYD-MEL during the week expecially they are dripping with status. To be fair though as a Bronze member I have always been preallocated an aisle just not that far forward. On and throughout the day you will find good seats open up as people on Flex tickets change flights etc so you can grab those, I tend to be quite succesfull at getting forward with that strategy.

So then 'Preferred Seating' just means that Qantas picks a seat for you, and assigns higher status members seats before lower/no-status folks? I guess the seats are picked before the 24h online checkin window.

Before OLCI was introduced 99% of domestic pre-allocation was done for the day by software in the early hours of the morning of that day.

There is conjecture that since OLCI was introduced, this automatic pre-allocation is now done either 1) in the early hours of the morning the day before, or 2) Some period around 25 hours before each flight.

Not quite.

On QF domestic, preferred seating means that you can designate a preferred seating choice ( e.g. window/aisle and forward/rear ) and QF will attempt to honour that request when automatic allocation takes place

On international, you can still select seats from the seatmap after the seating has closed for non status persons. Also, there are a few rows of seats in economy (Qualified seating) which are only available to passengers with OW status to pre-select from

Dave