If any Virgin pax are considering switching to BA to avoid this, that's frying pan into the fire.
For several years BA has not offered seat selection at the time of paid reservation, even for business pax.
On BA to get seat selection when booking, you have to have status in their frequent flier program, with a few other variations in rules according to status level.
For all but status pax, it's no-cost seat selection at 24 hours before departure when on-line check-in begins.
Some of us regular pax in Club World who don't have status have been purchasing the seat we want for several years now. And as more and more people join their status levels, especially the millions from OneWorld partners, to wait until online check-in at 24 hours is deadly on some routes.
BA have pretty much trained a lot of their regular pax to buy seats up front when we pay for the ticket. The rest of the good seats get snuffled by status pax.
It's not cheap either--it's $120 a seat (U.S.) each way for some business seats.
Virgin has long been much easier with this--especially giving seat selection to non-status premium pax, which BA has not done since about 2009 or 2010 if memory serves.
Last edited by baggersup; 29th July 2014 at 00:11.