Selecting seats on a complicated Aeroplan booking

I am currently in the midst of traveling on a complex Aeroplan award ticket. After a couple of weeks in Europe, my family and I flew this week from Paris to Mauritius on Air Mauritius as part of a larger Aeroplan award that also includes legs on Singapore Airlines and United. Mixed partner awards like these often present some complexity in terms of booking seats and extras, so I wanted to write a post about how I both failed and succeeded in taking care of those complexities for this trip. It’s worth noting that Greg has previously published an excellent guide to How to select seats on partner bookings that serves as a great shortcut for a lot of situations, though in this case I was a bit outside the scope of the guide.

Swing and a miss: failing to select seats on Air Mauritius

I was most excited about our Air Mauritius flights on this trip. That isn’t because of a special Air Mauritius product but rather because I’ve had Mauritius stuck in my head ever since planning for our 3 Cards 3 Continents challenge. I didn’t ultimately get there, but I was hooked on the idea of doing it.

Many months ago, I put plans in action to get to Mauritius. As noted in the introduction, I booked a somewhat complicated award ticket from Paris to Mauritius and onward to Asia and Oceania that includes legs on Air Mauritius (a non-alliance partner) and Star Alliance partners Singapore Airlines and United.

I typically try to select seats early after booking. In this case, I now remember that I was unable to do that on Air Mauritius shortly after booking and I figured that I’d take care of it at some point in the future. Unfortunately, I didn’t think about it again until I went to check in for our flight from Paris to Mauritius. I immediately realized that I hadn’t selected seats and we had thus been assigned unideal seats, with me in one row and my wife and kids in another and my wife and 3yr old separated by side tables between them such that it was a pain to be able to manage all of the things necessary during the flight. While my 3yr old has gotten pretty adept at travel and can usually figure out how to recline his seat by himself, he can’t reach the in-flight entertainment screen and little things of that sort that required help during the flight became cumbersome, particularly during taxi/take-off and periods of turbulence.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t hugely problematic and we all enjoyed our business class seats (and at least a few hours of sleep) well enough, but the miss on forgetting to select seats gave me a sense of urgency in getting the rest of our seats selected.

Air Canada makes it easy…ish to select seats on partners

Selecting seats on partner awards can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. A contributing factor to the difficulty, especially when booking via Air Canada Aeroplan (given their numerous alliance and non-alliance partners), is that different airlines are on different computer systems and thus sometimes have different confirmation numbers for the same itinerary — so while you may use one confirmation number to pull up the itinerary on the Air Canada website, you may need another confirmation code to view the itinerary on a partner site.

Conveniently, when you go to AirCanada.com and click on “Trips” to enter your Air Canada confirmation code and last name, it brings up your itinerary with the confirmation code for each airline in the itinerary.

That’s much appreciated. Some airlines make it difficult to find that information on your own. In some cases, you might have to call the airline through which you booked to get the confirmation code for the operating airline, which can be tedious given hold times to speak to an agent.

Air Canada makes it easy to find those multiple confirmation codes, but it still isn’t necessarily simple or straightforward getting seats assigned.

Selecting Air Mauritius seats on my Air Canada Aeroplan award booking

Our next flight on the itinerary will also be operated by Air Mauritius (after a stopover in Mauritius), so I wanted to be sure to select our preferred seats in advance this time. I went to the Air Mauritius website and entered the confirmation code. That did bring up the entire itinerary. Unfortunately, that didn’t do me much good. A warning at the top of the page made it clear that the website could not process my “Extra Services request online” (such as selecting seats).

I suspect that multiple airlines on a single ticket makes it more complicated to get seat assignments to stick (more on that to come with Singapore). The first time I got the message above, it only included the phone number. However, at some point the message began including an email address, which sounded a lot better than waiting on hold to speak with someone to assign seats.

I wanted to verify what the seating chart looked like for our upcoming flight, so I went to Aerolopa.com, which features excellent visual seat maps. Aerolopa confirmed my suspicion that the seating layout was essentially the same as it had been on our previous flight.

On the flight from Paris, we had been assigned something like the window seat in Row 5 and the middle seats in Row 6 along with the far window seat in Row 6. The tables in the middle made it difficult for my wife to help our younger son and my separation by a row didn’t make it much easier.

I wanted to make sure that we had middle seats like in rows 5 or 7 (I’ll sit with our 3yr old there). My wife and 6yr old would prefer window seats like in row 4 or 6, where the table is on the aisle side, increasing the odds of restful sleep thanks to being separated from the aisle.

I next went to the Air Mauritius website and went through the steps of making a dummy booking so that I could get to the seat selection step and see which seats were still available on our flight. Luckily, quite a few seats were available according to that map.

I next emailed Air Mauritius at the email address in the screen shot above and asked for the seat selections we wanted, specifying each passenger name with a desired seat number. I was pleasantly surprised when I received a response within less than two hours confirming that our seats had been assigned as requested.

I expected the net step to be easier, though it turned out to be less intuitive than I’d expected.

Selecting Singapore Airlines seats on my Air Canada Aeroplan award booking

I next went to the Singapore Airlines website looking to select seats for our segments on Singapore Airlines.

That reminded me that I had somehow previously selected seats on this segment of the trip. However, on one leg we wanted to switch up seats (with a similar strategy to the Air Mauritius one from a seating standpoint). I already had side-by-side middle seats assigned for myself and our 3yr old, but I wanted to switch my wife and 6or old from table-separated-middle-seats to window seats with the table on the aisle side. In the screen shot below, my wife and 6yr old had been assigned seats 17D and 17F and I wanted to switch them to 17A and 17K (the numbers 2 and 3 below). This screen shows my attempt to do this on the Singapore Airlines website.

I next clicked the button to “save & exit”. It looked like everything had worked, but when I pulled up the booking again, I found that my wife and son were back in 17D and 17F — the seats they wanted in 17A and 17K did not stick when I hit “save”.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. Sure enough, I kept repeating the process like a crazy person until I realized that it didn’t matter how many times I tried a new window or browser or whatever, the Singapore Airlines website wasn’t going to let me select seats.

Out of curiosity, I next tried to select meals. Singapore allows business class passengers (in some cases) to “Book the Cook”, choosing a meal in advance. I noticed that Singapore is offering what is purportedly A4 wagyu beef in business class. While I almost never order beef on a plane because it always comes out awful, the one time that I had great beef on a plane was on Singapore. I more often get vegetarian meals in-flight these days, but I was going to make an exception for A4 wagyu beef.

Unfortunately, I had the same problem as with seat selection: after clicking to “save” my selection, my preference went right back to “inflight menu”, with no specific meal selected. I couldn’t seem to manage the booking at all via Singapore’s website.

According to Greg’s excellent post about how to select seats on partner airlines, it should at least sometimes be possible to select seats on Star Alliance flight booked through Air Canada Aeroplan by going to the SAS Airlines website with the Air Canada confirmation code. I had forgotten about that tip, but when I tried using the Air Canada confirmation code on the SAS website, it didn’t bring up the booking at all (perhaps because this award has both Star Alliance and a non-alliance carrier).

However, to my surprise, I was able to assign seats for the Singapore Airlines-operated legs through AirCanada.com for the legs on Singapore Airlines. When I went back to the booking on the Air Canada website, Air Canada said that they could not help me select seats on Air Mauritius (no surprise there).

However, the Aeroplan website did  allow me to assign seats on the Singapore Airlines flight.

I only half believed that the seats were confirmed as I’ve sometimes seen partner sites say that seats are confirmed only to go to the operating carrier website and see those seats weren’t actually selected / saved to the itinerary.

However, in this case, I sure enough logged back in to the booking on the Singapore Airlines website and saw my newly-selected seats.

I think I’m going to have to call to try to “Book the Cook”, which I’ll be sure to do more than 24hrs before departure.

Selecting United Airlines seats on my Air Canada Aeroplan award booking

Selecting seats on the United leg of the trip was very easy — I simply went to United.com and I was able to enter either the Air Canada Aeroplan confirmation number or the United confirmation number. Either one worked to bring up the booking. Then I could click “change seats” to assign seats on the United leg.

Ironically, I could not select seats for the United leg on Air Canada’s website. I got the same sort of message as I had with Air Mauritius saying that I would need to contact United for seating assignments.

I should add that immediately after selecting seats, I saw those selections via all of the partner airlines websites. That is to say that I brought up the booking on AirCanada.com, AirMauritius.com, and United.com after changing seats and I saw the newly selected seats immediately reflected on all three sites.

Bottom line

Selecting seats on partner bookings isn’t always intuitive. Had I followed Greg’s advice to always start by trying to select seats on the website of the airline through which I had booked, I would have saved myself some time spent banging my head against the Singapore Airlines website as I’d have quickly assigned the seats I wanted for those legs through AirCanada.com. Air Mauritius proved to be a bit tricker, though ultimately doable via email when the website wouldn’t allow it. And thankfully, Air Canada Aeroplan makes it really easy to get all of the pertinent confirmation codes, which should make it very easy even if you have to call an operating carrier to select seats. That’s just another reason to appreciate Aeroplan’s focus on making the program friendly to those who like these sort of complex bookings. I think it’s great that I was able to assign seats on Singapore Airlines via the Aeroplan website — I’d love to see that kind of connectivity become the norm for partner bookings. That’s probably a pipe dream at this point, but Aeroplan continues to make me dream about both future trips and future tweaks that I imagine are in the works.

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