roomiest seat
 

I'm about to book a flight from Toronto to London with Air Canada. Any comments on which seat might have an extra inch or so of leg room on an Airbus 333 would be a great help.
thanks...

Check out www.seatguru.com

It is nice to get exit row seats, but I have never been able to reserve successfully. I have been assured that my seats were, but then they turned out not to be when I enplaned. Several here have mentioned that exit row seats are not assigned until the gate. There are so many seats that are held for medallion or whatever. As a low level, less than 50,000 ff miler, it's a crap shoot.
BTW, seatguru is not up-to-date on the 777-200. The ABC letters are wrong.

I can tell you where NOT to sit, and that's just in front of an exit row. I made this mistake coming back from Europe once. I am a vertically challenged person of only 5'3, yet my knees were squished against the seat in front of me. Furthermore, my seat barely reclined, as a deeper recline could block the exit row behind me. This happened on AA, where they advertise more legroom in coach. That may be true in the rest of the coach cabin, but not if you're sitting directly in front of an exit row!!

Generally speaking there are two types of seats that will give you more room. one is exit row and the other is bulkhead. Both are in limited supply. I know that Air Canada will not assign exit row seats until they see the passenger at the airport. Bulkhead can sometimes be reserved ahead but they are reluctant to do so. If you have a demonstrable need for more room they will do what they can to accomodate but if the flight is full then the options are limited. Bulkhead is a mixed blessing in my opinion. The main benefit is that knees attached to long legs do not contact the seat ahead. You can actually stretch out better in the normal seats because there is no bulkhead in the way of your feet. Passengers in bulkhead seats must stow all carry on above as there is no seat in front of you. There is seating diagram of AC's A333 online at http://www.aircanada.ca/about-us/our-fleet/au302q.html

The flight may be overbooked - ask when you check in. If it is overbooked, they either ask for volunteers to fly on a later flight (with compensation and sometimes an upgrade) or they will upgrade.

We've had luck with this - my partner was flying on points to Cape Town (through frankfurt) - we wee unable to get a business class ticket so he was in economy - when he checked in in TO he asked if the flight was full and made a comment that we'd tried to get a business class ticket - he was given his boarding pass, got to the check desk and was given a new boarding pass - business to Frankfurt!

we've also flown to the UK, flight was over sold, we knew ahead of time - because we'd asked when we checked in - so we sat very close to the gate and as soon as they started announcing the flight made our way to the desk becuase they were saying " ladies and gents I am afraid..." by this time I was at the desk "so we are asking for volunteers to.." - we went in the next flight in business and got $300 flight coupons each

It doesn't happen that often - but when it does be ready to take advantage.