Originally Posted by
Tinseltown
But when a flight is listed as 'sold out' on the BA website. I'm assuming it has actually been oversold and there may be more people turning up at the airport than seats available.
There's a conceptual difference between a flight being "overbooked" and "oversold", although I'm not sure whether these terms are used by BA in these senses: "overbooked" means that more reservations have been taken for a flight than there are physical seats on the aircraft, and "oversold" means that more people turn up for the flight than there are physical seats.
There are, routinely, very many flights which are overbooked but not oversold, because people cancel their reservations or simply fail to turn up for the flight. Don't underestimate these numbers. Once, I found out that the economy cabin in which I was booked to fly HKG-SYD was (at that time) overbooked by well over 100 people, but on the day the cabin had lots of empty space.
If the BA website says a flight is sold out, all you can really tell from that is that the flight has been overbooked to the overbooking limit. As people cancel their reservations, space may open up again. The expected number of no-shows may occur, so that even if the flight is still overbooked during check-in, the flight never becomes oversold because by the time that check-in closes the number of checked-in passengers doesn't exceed the number of physical seats.
But like all numbers games, sometimes it goes wrong. That's part of life.
Originally Posted by
Tinseltown
My evening flight in two weeks time is sold out in Y but am flying in J where there are still two seats left (for now). I do hope nothing stupid happens as have an appointment at 9am the next day.
You're travelling. Expect that things may go wrong, for this reason or another, and have contingency plans in place!