Having now completed the outward flights, I’m no wiser about Etihad’s seat selection process. It turned out that I could select a seat online for the third leg once that leg was open for check in, but only the ones not designated as “space seats”. Considering most of the front half of the Y cabin are space seats (and yes, they do seem to have a little more room, but not enough to rationalise the charges), it left me with few options. I would have thought they’d open up all these seats for seat selection at this point. I don’t know if the system registered me as a partner platinum either, or if that would have made a difference even if it did.
On the second leg - MEL to AUH - I was placed in a row of three space seats with my travelling partner, meaning we had an extra seat between us. It wasn’t a full flight, so most of this section had a middle seat free. Because we were assigned the two aisle seats, I can only assume the woman on the telephone had done this deliberately. I was very grateful.
Because I had only been able to choose non-space seats online for the third leg, I’d chosen an aisle and a middle in the middle section. But I’m greedy: I wanted a spare between us. I knew the load was low for this third leg so on arriving in Abu Dhabi, I decided to ask the staff in the 1st class lounge if we could move into a space row with a spare seat. They checked and came back to me “there are many spare seats, but only middle seats. There are also space seats but we have to charge you extra. We can not unlock the seats without payment.” (I thanked her anyway and tucked into my lounge duck and champagne)
It seems extraordinary that lounge staff don’t have the capacity to assign seats on a low-load flight to a partner platinum member. And yet it seems that the woman in the call centre could do so. Considering so much of the Y cabin is taken up with these unremarkable space seats, it seems bizarre that they’d continue to block them at the late stage of two hours until take off.
When we boarded the third leg, the guy sitting on the edge of our row of three was cross that everyone else had a middle seat free, and pounced on a free seat up in the space section before we even took off (our gain too!). There was lots of movement like this around the cabin before we’d taken off. The exit row and bulk head seats remained mostly empty with “reserved” signs on them. Only a few people coughed up the hundreds of dollars to sit in these seats, and Etihad is not giving anything away for free apparently. The FAs pounced on anyone even considering moving to those seats.
My game plan for my return journey is to ring the Australian call centre for seat allocation when I online check in opens. At this stage they seem to have more power than other staff to allocate seats. But this first experience of Etihad seating allocation has been very contradictory and disorganised, so I’m not holding my breath.
