A few thoughts on this:
I apologize in advance if this has been discussed before but wanted to see if someone could clarify a question for me on fare class availability. I know that during the first part of a week (usually Tues) fares are normally updated in the system.
In fact, fares are updated in the system about 18 times a week - three times a day during the week, twice on Saturday, and once on Sunday (I think that's still true). Price increases tend to come out later in the week, while sales tend to come out earlier.
Towards the end of the week, does Delta tend to "block" certain fare buckets in the hopes of getting people to buy a higher fare ticket and then "unblock" the lower class fares the following week? The reason I'm asking is that I priced a ticket earlier this week and checked again today and the fare was almost $250 higher. Thinking that maybe the fare classes sold out, I went to Expertflyer to check the availability on the flights and came up with the following:
T0 U0 L0 K0 Q0 H0 M9 B9 Y9 A9 P9 F9
Buckets open and close based on a formula which looks at: (a) current bookings; (b) historical booking trends; (c) bookings on other O&Ds utilizing that segment; and (d) individual analyst adjustments. Based on my experience buying tickets on DL over the last year, my guess is that their YM strategy is to avoid opening up U and T until it's clear a flight is not doing well on bookings. Seeing it zeroed out up to M tells me that the flight is doing better than expected at this point in the booking curve.
Checking the DL website seems to confirm that the lowest fare available is an M fare. What doesn't seem to make sense to me is that when I check the seat map, there are almost 100 unassigned seats remaining on the aircraft. I understand that sometimes the seatmaps aren't updated in a timely manner however it seems like there is a large discrepancy with what shows as availabile in Expertflyer versus the seat map.
The number of unsold seats doesn't necessarily translate to the need to open up lower booking classes. For example, suppose you had historical data showing the following booking curve for a 100 seat aircraft on AAA-BBB
330-90 days: 10 (90)
90-60 days: 10 (80)
60-30 days: 10 (70)
30-21 days: 30 (40)
21-14 days: 10 (30)
14-7 days: 10 (20)
7-3 days: 15 (5)
3-0 days: 5 (0)
Now if you were 100 days out, and had already sold 25 seats, you'd definitely want to ratchet things down a bit - you are well ahead of the booking curve, even though the flight is only 25% full. Then it gets even more complicated, as sometimes seats are held for connecting itineraries (MOB-ATL-LHR) and not open on the local (MOB-ATL) - this is because the airline wants to sell the ATL-LHR segment as well.
So long story short, the number of open seats doesn't dictate the fare class availability.
I'm going to check again for the same flights next week to see if any other class availability opens up but if anyone could shed some light on why there could be zero availability in the lower classes but the seat map shows a wide open flight I'd apprecate it. Thanks and safe travels!
I think that's a good plan. The odds of M closing before you buy at this point are lower than the odds of something below it opening up. I tend to keep an eye on flights when they're only open in L, and then as soon as I see something in U or T open up I grab it. So far it's worked well.