EXPERT FLYER - DISAPPOINTING

Folks - I flew out to Tobago a couple of weeks ago on Virgin and checked the seat availability on Expert Flyer 4 hours before departure. It showed 7 seats available in all Economy classes, which I believe is the minimum number of seats available, so I was expecting to see a minimum of 50 available seats, probably towards the back of the aircraft, as these seem to be less sought-after.
However, upon walking around the aircraft once airbourne, the plane was full and this was confirmed by the flight staff.
I am preparing my major Australia trip next November and was relying on Expert Flyer for my seat strategy - but can it be trusted??
Thanx

I think you saw the correct behaviour. Some of the seats are not assigned until passengers are in the airport and in the check in. And if I have understood correctly availability of 7 means that there is 7 or more seats available, it can also mean that there is 8 seat available, it doesn't necessarily mean that there is 50 seats available.

Different GDSs never tell you what is the actual load - they just tell you how much there is availability for sale.

You wrote that there were "7 seats available in all Economy classes". This does not mean that you add the class availabilities together! There is a degree of overlap in these systems, so "Y7 S7 M7 Q7" does not necessarily mean there are at least 28 free seats. There may be less. It does take a little practice to work out how each airline is set up.

[Pete]

As others have said, you don't add up the numbers to get to the total amount of availability. Y7 B7 M7 Q7, for instance, means 7 or more in Economy, since Y is the full fare in Economy and all the others are subsets of the full fare, not exclusive fare buckets. I can always buy a seat in the full fare bucket if I need the flexibility, but they'll only allow a certain amount of them to go out in the discounted buckets. If you see N7, the lowest fare class, it's quite likely that the cabin is wide open, since if there's max availability in the cheapest class, it's unlikey to be oversold.

Next point that probably caught you out. The amount of seats available to buy, and the amount of physical seats are two different numbers. All airlines regularly oversell seats - especially in the Economy cabin, because they have carefully controlled systems to predict passenger no-shows, changes, etc. All airlines want to fly with no empty seats, so they oversell by as much as 20% on certain routes.

Expert Flyer will have definately shown you an accurate picture right up until the flight closed. For your Australian trip, it will prove very useful, but you may want to do some more reading up on interpreting GDS results.

Pete

[Nottingham Nick]

Other factors to consider include staff travellers / non revs, and other stand by pax, none of whom will be known about by expertflyer.com. Also, if another airline has had a major delay / cancellation, they will look to off load pax onto other carriers.

All in all, expertflyer.com is an excellent tool to show the types of fare classes that are available - thereby facilitating tactical booking, but it will never be a sure fire way to judge how full a plane will be.

Nick

When expertflyer.com shows all zeros in economy for few days before the flight and you have top tier status and you know that you are usually lucky then it is a nice situation. And even on that moment you know that expertflyer.com cannot estimate the number of no-shows.

But with another airline I have been looking for the availability and there has been cases when economy has been all zero availability and indeed there has been an op-up waiting for me in the airport.

But, expertflyer.com is not about the availability completely. For me it provides very nice place to get the full fare rules and planning tools etc. And seatmap feature is very useful.

Picking up on the point of no-shows, I think that routes such as the 601 have the highest no-show rate, although I'm not sure what it depends on.

Cheers,
VS045