Why do some airlines make you wait 24 hours til departure to pick your seat?

Mike R
#1. May 23rd, 2008, at 5:46 PM.

It’s extremely annoying and makes no sense.

Nathan R
#2. May 24th, 2008, at 11:38 AM.

Airlines do not no what plane they will use. They have a good idea but sometimes they need a bigger aircraft and sometimes a smaller aircraft. If they allow you to book your seat before and they change the aircraft people will not be happy. For example I am going to South Africa at the End of June with South African Airways bt I cannot book a seat because SAA could use 3 types of planes. But in March I booked a flight for my brother to go to Turkey from london with Turkish Airlines and he could book his seat as the only have one that operates that route
Hope this is what you wanted to know

dcgirl
#3. May 27th, 2008, at 6:10 PM.

Some reasons:

-Resellers like Expedia and Travelocity often have to wait till right before the flight to assign seats (or allow customers to pick) because the airlines set aside the more desirable seats for the customers who purchase directly from the airlines. These days, the airlines are often selling tickets for exactly the same price as the resellers, sometimes even less, but they make less profit because they have to turn some of the money over to the resellers; so they want to encourage people to book with the airlines instead of the resellers. In other words, if you booked the same trip with United instead of Travelocity, you might be able to pick your seat right when you buy it. Letting the more profitable customers have first selection of seats encourages people to buy from the airlines instead of the resellers.

-Some flights are operated by third parties, for example a USAirways flight may have a USAirways plane paint-job but the plane is really owned by a partner like Mesa Air. This is most common on regional jets/flights less than 2 hours. The two companies share a lot of information but their reservation and ticketing systems may not be completely integrated. At the 24-hour mark your reservation transfers to the primary carrier and both sets of reservations (those booked with USAir and those booked with Mesa) are merged. Now passengers can select their seats in one computer system but before 24 hours, because one computer doesn’t see the reservations in the other computer, two people might select the same seat.

-Codeshares work the same way as partners– you might buy a flight on United and show up to find it is an Air Canada plane just using a United flight number. Airlines often pair up like this when demand is not too high; they make more money sharing a plane than each operating a half-full plane, and the same computer problems keep you from picking out a seat till one airline takes the reservations over from the other.

-Some flights, like shuttles between major cities (NY-Boston for example) have unpredictable loads. Airlines usually put big planes on these routes because sometimes there are a lot of passengers, but often the planes are not very full. So they hold back the seats till just before the flight, so that they can look at the passenger load and block some seats out. That prevents anyone from sitting in the blocked seats, which helps arrange passengers evenly through the rest of the cabin, which helps make sure the plane is properly balanced for takeoff.

There’s other reasons, too but these are the main ones. And as far as knowing what kind of plane will be used for a trip, well, airlines know that about a year in advance, so there’s no such thing as going to get a bigger plane if too many people want to be on the small plane.

crace
#4. May 30th, 2008, at 3:22 PM.

I am flying American and I picked my seats when i booked