Please tell us whether you prefer to sit by the aisle or window, as far front as possible or in the back. We will do our best to accommodate you.
Please do not ask for bulkhead or emergency exit row seats as those seats are not available for selection. They are either sold as preferred seats by carriers such as Air Canada or assigned at check-in so that the airline can check the passenger’s suitability in compliance with safety regulations.
If you utilize third party sources such as www.seatguru.com to check desirability of your assigned seats, you should know that airlines do substitute aircraft without notice and modify cabin configurations more often than those third party sources can keep up. The data in Global Distribution Systems that travel retailers rely on should be identical to what you see on the airlines’ websites. However, it is not uncommon to spot discrepancies between the two sources once in a while. So, if you see what we didn’t see at the time of ticketing, please don’t assume we fell asleep!
How Do We Pick Seats for Our Customers
There is no standardized one-size-fits-all cabin configuration for large passenger jets. It is common for the same version of one aircraft model to have several cabin configurations due to preferences of the airlines. Below are some examples to help you understand our rationale in picking certain seats:
10 seats per row: ABC||DEFG||HJK (e.g. B747-400, UA)
9 seats per row: ABC||DEG||HJK (e.g. B777-200LR, AC)
9 seats per row: AB||CDEFG||HJ (e.g. B777, AA)
9 seats per row: ABC||DEF||JKL (e.g. B787-8, UA)
8 seats per row: AC||DEFG||HK (e.g., B787-8, ANA)
7 seats per row: AC||DEF||HK (e.g. B767-300, AC)
Picking seats for singles is simple. It can be very tricky for couples. When available, the most ideal seats for couples would be one aisle seat and one window seat side by side as shown above on a B767-300, a model Air Canada is actually phasing out from its mainline. Failing that, we’d pick 2 aisles seats (D&G or D&F) if the seats in between are empty at the time of selection.
Our thinking is that if the empty seats remain unfilled at the time of boarding, the couple would end up with three or four or five seats. There is really no downside to this arrangement because the worst case scenario would be swapping one of the aisle seats with a passenger stuck in the middle. On long-haul flights, you need easy access to the aisle and yet you want to minimize the chance of being bothered while you are sleeping. When it is impossible to get two aisle seats or when one of the seats in the middle is already taken, we’d try to grab an aisle seat and one right beside it.