How do you select seats on Alaska Airlines flights booked through British Airways?

When it comes time to select seats on a flight, it is usually quite a painless process. You go to the airline’s website, hit Manage Booking, enter your details and do what you need to do. However, when it comes to codeshare flights, things can be more difficult.

A codeshare flight is one you see in your booking that has “Operated By: Another Airline” next to it. Since there are several different airline reservations systems, it’s sometimes not possible to choose a seat on the other airline’s service. It might say “Seat selection available at check-in” – but who wants to wait that long?

Select Seats On Alaska Airlines

British Airways codeshare on both American Airlines and Alaska Airlines among others. BA uses Amadeus for their reservations while the two US carriers use Sabre. This means that when you have a British Airways ticket containing flights with these airlines, you are unable to select a seat on ba.com.

What you need to do is to get the codeshare airline’s booking reference. With American Airlines, BA will show you when you try to select a seat, though it doesn’t transfer you automatically like it used to. Once you have the AA reference, you go to their website and choose the seats you want there. For Alaska Airlines it is somewhat different. You will need to telephone British Airways and ask them for the codeshare booking reference. They will happily tell you what it is over the phone. When you have it, go to the Alaska Airlines website and pop it in. You then get their booking screen, scroll down to the Passenger Information section and click the word “add” beside “Seat”. That will bring you in to select your seats.

Overall Thoughts

It is 2021 and of course airline IT continues to lag behind the rest of the world in many ways. Selecting seats on codeshare flights on airlines with different reservations systems is one pain point for customers that needs to be corrected.

I just spent 30 minutes on the phone to British Airways with 26 of those holding, to get my Alaska Airlines booking reference. British Airways could save everyone the hassle by displaying the other airlines confirmation code or PNR somewhere in Manage My Booking for us loyal customers to see.

Have you tried to select a seat on a codeshare flight booked through British Airways? Is the information here useful? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Tomás Del Coro via Wikimedia Commons.