Consolidated: Award travel with partner airlines - choosing seats?
 

Seems to be more availability with partner airlines than United for award flights? No idea why but one drawback seems to be you cant pick your seat like you can for a united flight.

Trying to book award travel from london/florida. Wife will be 6 months pregnant by the time we go so wanted if possible to upgrade to premium economy and get front row bulkhead. Not an easy task cos it means going through and checking each flight combo......

Made more difficult because for partner flights I cant even see the seats left. If I book partner flight does it then give me a ref so I can go to, say, air canada and upgrade/pick my seat?

You can usually go to the partner website and do a dummy revenue booking to see the seat map for the flight. To actually get those seats, you would book the ticket through united, who will give you a record locator for the other airline (not the same as the UA locator). Then you can call the other airline with that locator and get assigned a seat. (Note, however, that not all airlines let you assign seats ahead of time, and many that do block bulkheads until day of departure as they are often held for families with post-birth babies in need of bassinets.)

Seems Air Canada will only let you pre-book seats if you book on their website though.

Also, UA/continental seem happy to see those bulkhead seats in advance ;-)
I guess the lure of someone paying extra for them is more interesting that giving someone the facilty with their baby for free!

Yes, no seat selection in advance for AC for codeshares.

UA gives those seats to elites at no extra charge, or they can be purchased for a fee. They don't block them off for families. I don't know why anyone would expect them to.

I always thought you could get record locator (for other airline) and choose seats from the other airline's website. I haven't tried the AC though, only Lufthansa and US Airways. Worked fine though.

I have a reward ticket on 6 different *A airlines and UA could only give me the Air Canada and the UA record locators :/

I prob should call back and see if they have them now.

Just off the phone and they had a few more of the record locators. They didn't have Thai Airways or Croatia Airways though. No US number for Croatia either. I guess I'll just roll the dice or try calling on Skype later. Not too worried about my seat on their Q400. The 4 flights totaling 26 hours on Thai is another story :)

Yeah for some reason I could never get record locators on Thai flights from pmCO either. Hopefully they fix this sooner rather than later.

Booking some award segments on Thai in biz later this year. Just curious, without a record locator, were you able to select seats? Thx.

Not online. I was able to do it calling in to Thai rez, but it was somewhat of a hassle. I've had the same problem with US rewards on Thai, so it makes me think that Thai's IT may not be the best. OTOH, UA was always able to show the Thai record locator so who knows.

Ok, I just called and changed some seat reservations. Thai 1-800 number is: 1-800-426-5204. 3 people were in line in front of me and wait time was about 5 minutes. I gave her my first flight and my last name and she found the record locator (which I then asked for).

She then went flight by flight and asked if I wanted to change any of my seats. The UA chosen 1A on MUC-BKK and BKK-FRA were fine by me :D
HKT-BKK is evidently airport only which is strange.

She was nice and quick and the whole thing took a few minutes.

I plugged my record locator into the Thai website but was not able to see any seat maps or change seats or anything. Correct seat assignments were shown though.

Just out of curiosity, is there any other kind of baby?

:p

I went through the identical experience with an UA award ticket on Thai flight. I would love to be able to see and change my Thai flight seat assignment online.

The seat selection issue with UA code shares on Air Canada is tiresome. As best I can tell, some random seat gets assigned when you book the code share via UA on an 016 ticket. And you can see this seat when you login to the AC Web site using the AC record locator (you have to call someone at UA or AC to learn this record locator). The seat number may not display in the usual place, but I did find it on the "View Receipt" page at the very bottom. If you don't like that seat then you need to call Air Canada to get the seat assignment revoked, then call UA to get them to request a different seat. (You can make a fake booking on the flight via the AC web site to see what seats are available.) Many UA reservations agents do not know how to request the seat assignemnt from AC, but apparently there is a special requests screen that allows it. After the request is made it can take 24 to 48 hours for the new seat assignment to becme visible on the AC "View Receipt" page. Not too smooth !!!

Others have had problems with codeshares, but since you are booking an award which may carry an AC flight number, you *might* be able to get around it by calling. You *might* also be able to get around by buying a premium seat, like in an exit row.

Mrs. PVDProf and I took our TATL babymoon at 5 months pregnant, and we felt the extra miles spent on the biz seat for Mrs. PVDProf were really well spent...the extra space and ability to be horizontal made a big difference, and definitely helped her be able to do things the day we arrived. Consider getting her a C seat, even if it uses all your miles and you need to buy yourself a Y ticket.

OP said Mrs. paulfoel was going to be six months pregnant. IME, it is a bad idea to suggest to pregnant women that there is no baby around. :D