Originally Posted by
ccyao
What's a long sell?
To manually force a reservation by specifying the date, flight, fare bucket and number of pax, despite the inventory in that fare bucket showing nil.
It's only effective when there's actual inventory but a bug/glitch is causing the inventory to show differently.
For example, once (back when VA/DJ used the old res system, and VS still flew to SYD) I booked HKG-SYD on VS after having verified availability through VS own website, but DJ's agent insisted they could not see availability. When they tried the long sell, the response came back as confirmed to their amazement.
The inventory need not to be an award one. I once got a confirmed paid fare on EWR-MAD with UA despite a zeroed out flight on the standalone sector (UA had inventory open for thorough itineraries e.g. XXX-EWR-MAD-YYY).