Originally Posted by ExAAerOnDL

A few thoughts on this:



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.



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.



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 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.