Originally Posted by
roses777
I'm looking into booking a flight with rewards travel and I'm just a little confused about how to figure out the official # of spots left on an AA flight.
The things confusing me:
1) just to make sure I understand this correctly, when you see the little orange squares on the seat diagram that means that those seats haven't been unassigned yet, but does not mean that there are that many spots left on the flight?
2) when you use a search engine like Bing Travel, it sometimes will say "5 seats left" or whatever on your search results, is that the "official" # directly reported by AA?
3) When you use the "hold" feature on the AA website, that is officially reserving you a seat for the time being (until the hold deadline) right? If I waited right before the hold deadline to finally purchase the flight I would be guaranteed to be able to do that and get a spot, right?
Sorry for the long post, and thank you for your help.
Welcome to FT!
There is no such thing as "official # of spots." You can find out the number of seats that the airline is willing to sell, or you can find out the number of seats that are unassigned, but this has nothing to do with how many actual "spots" are available. Airlines routinely overbook, and many people book but do not select seats.
As long as you purchase before the hold deadline, the reservation is held for you and you can get a ticket. There is always a small possibility that the flight will be oversold and you may not be able to get on it when you arrive at the gate, but this is rare. You can improve your chances of not being "bumped" by getting yourself an assigned seat.
Having said that, there are people who like to get bumped because then they can get compensation from the airline.