I just booked a flight from sydney to cairns and back. one way on virgin blue and return on jetstar. how are seat assignments made on these airlines?

I'm not sure of the exacr answer to your question, but, just to start the ball rolling, I have topped a post which tells you some things about Jetstar that you need to know.

I'm sure others will answer the question about the ticketing!

We flew JetStar last month between Melbourne and Hobart and back - we had no problems and quite liked the airline. Here's their seating policy directly from their website:

Free Seating

Jetstar has a free seating policy.

It does not mean that you will miss out on sitting with your family.

We will pre-board passengers with small children and customers requiring special assistance who have made arrangements through Jetstar call centre.

All other passengers will be given a boarding priority on their boarding pass, this will be based on the time that you checked in.

For example: Passengers with numbers 1-65 will board the aircraft first followed by numbers 66 onward.

JetStar is planning to reward pax who check in early with priority seating using colour-coded boarding passes. This article gives the rundown:

http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/12/1...787085504.html

Last I heard Virgin Blue allocates seat numbers in the conventional way.

We will be taking our first Jetstar trip in January but what I have been told seems as others have said above. The only other thing was that , since you choose your own seats in theory , try to avoid the front ones as they are very cramped. Don't know how true this is. Cheers!

Aside from seating:

Virgin Blue was more strict than Qantas with their luggage limit policy. We were slightly over and had to pay $50 for the extra baggage last year, on an Alice Spr-Sydney flight. Qantas inside Australia sometimes assumed you came from NAmerica with them and tolerates their NA luggage limits on domestic flights. (But not from NZ to Australia!)

you get an allocated seat on Virginblue. we did 10 flights with them recently and they were all great and we had approx 30kg extra and werent charged on any of the flights!

planes are immaculate and all but one left bang on time!

happy flying!

M