BA charges $90 per seat to do advance seat selection for business class (for our overseas flight, US to UK). I have no intention of doing that; we can wait and try to grab seats at check-in time. But I checked on the availablity of seats just out of curiousity. I found that for our flight, all the window seats in the lower cabin are already claimed, and NO seats are available in the upper cabin.

I am curious about those upper cabin seats. Have people actually paid to book every one? Or do they just not make them available for advance seat selection at all?

When's your trip, from where? You may have encountered a flight where elite frequent flyers have picked the good seats already, or where BA is holding them back on the assumption people will pay for them. I believe I've seen posts on Flyertalk to the effect that certain seats aren't even allowed to be picked at all by pre-payers, e.g. 62AK and 64AK on the upper deck (best seats in the house) so that they can be reserved for elites.

Note too that some BA routes (e.g. SEA-LHR) are <i>very heavily</i> traveled by BA elites using revenue tickets (e.g. a certain software company based outside Seattle) and getting the good seats is really hard for pax without FF status, whether they pay or not.

Gardyloo is right on. I fly SEA-LHR several times a year and Club is almost always full, and the best seats go quickly. I usually go for 62K, and almost always manage to snare it, but I have elite status and usually purchase my tickets 6 months out or more.

BA usually blocks 64A, 14E and 20E on its 747s until online check-in opens. These are bulkhead seats with infant cots. If no passengers book with infants, the seats are released.

Thanks! Yes, we are flying SEA to LHR, and since they cut the later flight, this one is probably even more full than usual. And we are not "elite" status, so we'll just be content with our seats in the lower cabin.

enzian, I just looked at the seating maps for my flight SEA-LHR in May. My seat (62K!) is the only one taken on the upper deck and and it's wide-open, no seats taken yet, on the lower deck. On the return, LHR-SEA, there is one other seat taken on the upper deck, in addition to mine (62K again!) and there's one seat reserved on the lower. All other seats show as available.

Which leads me to believe that BA is probably holding back a lot of seats on your flights for now. You might plan to check in online as soon as it's available, 24 hours before your flight. You should be able to get good seats then, unless your flight is heavily booked by elites.

BA used to assign family groups their seats 3 days before the flight. I don't know if they still do, but it might be worth your while to contact them about it.

And a personal experience: in October I was returning from Dubrovnik with my husband. Because mine was a revenue ticket and his was a reward tickets, we were on separate bookings. I reserved a seat for myself, upper deck, but wasn't able to get one for him because he isn't elite and was on the separate booking. And we weren't able to check-in online as soon as it opened because we were in the air. To make a long story short, when he finally checked in, his seat was downstairs. I asked about changing his seat when we got to the Lounge, they couldn't do anything about it there, but they put a note in his record. As soon as we boarded, a steward started rearranging people and seats and he ended up upstairs with me.