Originally Posted by
majorwibi
Its more of a cargo issue than a pax issue, similar to some of the South American routes. What usually happens is that there appear to be plenty of seats on the plane (via seatcounter or deltanet) but revenue management has already planned/allocated some of those seats (or the weight for those seats) to cargo. Non-Revs look at the seats and say I can get on this flight without an issue, yet the plane pushes with them still watching from the airport.
As an example DL only flys one flight 3x per week from AMM to anywhere in the US. All other flights are AF or some other codeshare that buddy passes cant get on.
How accurate is SeatCounter? I just check ATL-FCO on 05-05-2009 and compared their availability against the seat map on Delta.com, and SeatCounter reflected
a lot of open seats (usually 9 in each fare class). The Delta seat assignment map shows 4 open BE seats and 5-10 coach seats. I'm guessing all the available seats SeatCounter is reporting is due to how much Delta is willing to oversell the flight.