Peach

Peach is ANA's low-cost carrier, based at Osaka's Kansai airport and built around leisure flying: Japanese domestic trunk routes, the holiday islands and short-haul international hops around East Asia. It runs as a genuinely separate operation from its parent, with its own fares, its own crews and a fleet kept deliberately simple.

That simplicity is good news for seat pickers. Every published Peach layout is a single economy cabin, three-by-three from nose to tail, on an all-Airbus A320-family fleet. There is no premium cabin to weigh up and no fleet lottery to worry about; the decision comes down to how far forward you sit and whether the marked legroom rows are worth the fare on your sector.

The published layouts cover the A320, the A320neo and the A321neo, which for Peach is the long-range A321LR airframe used on its longest leisure runs. All three are all-economy.

The A320 is the original workhorse. The A320neo fits a couple more rows by reworking the rear of the cabin around a larger galley area, so its last rows sit deeper in service territory than the A320's do. The A321LR is the biggest cabin in the fleet and the one where seat choice matters most, both because the sectors are longer and because its marked extra-legroom rows are scarcer than on the smaller jets.

Peach is no-frills in the tidy, Japanese sense: a clean and consistent cabin, buy-on-board catering, and the same seat at every row. The comfort difference between one seat and another is almost entirely legroom and position.

The front bulkhead rows and the over-wing exit rows hold the extra space on every aircraft. Bulkhead seats give up under-seat stowage and keep the tray in the armrest; the exit rows carry the usual door-row conditions. Recline is off the table for everyone: the whole fleet flies fixed shells, set once in a gentle pre-recline, so no seatback ever drops into your knees. On a one-hour domestic hop none of this matters much. On the longer international runs the A321LR flies, the gap between a marked row and a standard one is worth paying to close.

Forward is the default: the front rows board late, disembark first and sit furthest from the galley end of the aircraft. At the back, the trade is plain enough, with the final rows parked against the rear galley and the lavatory queue, and on the A320neo that galley zone is larger than the aircraft's size suggests. The seats do not recline anywhere in the fleet, so the familiar warning about the row ahead of the exits does not apply here; every position holds the same gentle pre-recline from pushback to gate.

On the A321LR, move early. Its extra-legroom rows are scarce, a single bulkhead row at the nose and one band further back, and a few window seats along that cabin sit against blank or misaligned panels, the kind of thing the map flags and the booking page does not. Window purists should pick their exact seat rather than their rough area on that aircraft.