I thought that once the timer started counting down on the booking page that the seat(s) would be unavailable for anyone else to book for the next 5 minutes or until a booking reference was issued.

E.g. If I went to book 2 tickets on grabaseat, after the timer starts counting down the grabaseat homepage counter should show 2 less seats for the route I am booking?

Just tried a mock booking to see if I could "hold" 9 AKL-NRT tickets, but the grabaseat seat counter didn't decrease by 9.