stormintheforest

Hi! Hoping someone can help with what may be an ignorant question...

I'm wondering if someone can explain to me what it means, in terms of pricing, when an airline says "There are XX seats left at this price." The tickets I'm looking at are for international travel in November this year. When I check the seat maps for the flights, the flights are still almost entirely empty. So I'm wondering how it could be that the lowest fare class is already showing as sold out? Is this just a marketing gimmick? Could more seats at a lower price open up later on? Am I just looking too early?

mapleg

Often just marketing nonsense particularly if from a 3rd party site, just like those hotel sites that say only 2 rooms left at this rate.. Check a month later, and hey, guess what, still those 2 are available.

Are you checking an airline site run by the air line itself, or some 3rd party site?

abmj-jr

Actually, it means that only 2 seats are left in that fare bucket. There are still plenty of seats in other, higher priced buckets. Most airlines severely limit how many seats are made available in the cheapest bucket. If the flight is not selling out, they could add more seats to that cheap bucket later. Inventory management is a voodoo art we mere mortals are not meant to understand.

cynicAAl

sounds like marketing nonsense meant to scare gullible people into buying now for fear that price will be gone soon. Reminds me of the late night infomercial sales pitch that if you call in the next 10 minutes (and there's a timer on the screen counting down), you'll get a super bonus gift. Of course, since this same infomercial is playing all night long on multiple channels, I always wondered when that 10 minute window started and ended.

emma69

Just to add, seat maps are not always a good indication of ticket sales - some airlines charge for seat selection so people wait until 24 hours out when online check in opens. Took such a flight in January, at T-25 hours there were a ton of seats showing (and at T-24 I checked in and got my seats) by T-1 hour, the flight was completely full, not a spare seat.

Kettering Northants QC

Recent articles in the UK with several airlines have shown that the XX seats available at this price is nonsense. Prices can go up or down after those seats have gone.

Wally Bird

As abmj-jr correctly states, the yield management shenanigans are continuous. The 'only XX seats' is correct (ie. not nonsense) while you are looking at that page, but it can easily be construed as hard selling - buy now! buy now! - by those who don't know it for what it is; merely a snapshot in time conveying no information about what may happen (up/down) tomorrow, or the next hour etc., etc.

The airlines will usually honor the price you see before you but the independent booking engines regularly give your 'proceed' click a Sorry The Price Has Changed greeting .

Often1

This isn't nonsense and, if you are looking at a carrier's own website as opposed to some third party, it will generally reflect what is available at that moment at that price.

1. Seat maps mean nothing. The aircraft could be sold out and have 90% of the seats not selected.

2. Carriers sell seats at different fare buckets. How many is a function of the carrier's historical experience and future projections of sales. If sales slow, it will open up more low-cost seats and as those seats sell, only higher fare buckets will be available.

3. If you wait to purchase, fares may go up, they may go down, the flight may sell out or if you are traveling with people where seating matters, seats together may go away.

cordelli

They are constantly repricing the fares of every flight. Or I should say how many of each fare bucket are available.

In the simplest of terms, they want to make x amount of dollars for a flight. they have statistics to tell them about how many seats they can expect to sell on the flight. So the software keeps opening and closing buckets to get them closer to that total number of dollars for the flight.

If somebody buys a set of really cheap economy tickets, they may not have the lower fare buckets available. If somebody buys expensive full fare economy, they may open a few of the lower buckets for people.

It means that at that moment in time they have that many seats left at that price. If for example they say there are four seats left at that price, and you try to book ten seats, the ten seats will many times be at a higher price, because there are not ten in the lower fare class.

That does not mean they won't open more in the future, and the future can be five seconds, five minutes, five days, or five nevers.

It also has very little to do with the number of empty seats on a plane (of which the seat map does not show you). The plane could be almost empty, and if their revenue management software says they can sell less seats for more money to make more money, they will not open seats li the lower buckets.

CodeAdam10

In my experience it isn't complete nonsense. I have been in a situation where if it shows "2 seats left at XX price" and I select 3+ adults, it shows me a different (higher) price. So if you are getting this info directly from the airline's website, I wouldn't totally disregard it. Of course they may release more seats at the lower price point in the future, but for that moment (or day) in time, that information is probably accurate.

PS- I once tried to bypass such scenario on SWA. I needed to book (2) one-way award tickets and it was showing only "1 seat left at XX points". I decided to use 2 different browsers to buy both separately (1 at a time), and even though I clicked "Submit" on both browsers within a second of one another, it still rejected one of the booking with a "Oops, the price/flight is no longer available" message.

getsaround

The lack of transparency and airline pricing policies border on consumer fraud.

It's recently been revealed that if a customer repeatedly checks a site for a particular flight the "cookies" they leave results in higher fare quotes. The more they check the high the fare.

Travel is such a racket. You really have to know how to play the game with airlines, hotels and rental car companies.

sbm12

Cite?

In some cases repeatedly selecting a flight but not completing the transaction will "hold" seats out of inventory so the actual available inventory will change. But a carrier not actually offering the lowest fare on the requested routes/dates would be quite surprising.

getsaround

The "cookies" allegation was in a piece from "Smarter Travel" not long ago.
It's something I've suspected for a long time because most of my bookings are last minute and I'm constantly checking in the days leading up to a potential trip.

Recently I was checking the United site and all of a sudden the cheapest economy fare went from something like $292 to $625 yet the seat map had not changed. I didn't book it, needless to say.

cordelli

The cookie pricing has been discussed in the past, but I don't believe it's ever been proven here or in any of the other stories that it was actually happening.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...eir-price.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...il-crumbs.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...s-cookies.html

I have to believe with the millions of searches people here do on a constant basis if there was any real cookie conspiracy, there would be screen shots, key strokes, cookie analysis, etc.

China Clipper

There's something I've never seen....