Originally Posted by
stealthferret
I'd have said it looks like First have sold 10 seats as the cabin holds 14 and there's 4 left, of which 3 are in a reduced fare bucket? But I suppose they could have sold 11, choosing to keep 4 open, one of which is an overbooking slot on the basis *someone* will miss the flight...?
It could also be that they've taken zero reservations to date in F and don't now expect to take more than 4, but the level of J bookings that have been taken between the two sets of figures have led to the algorithms currently predicting that by check-in closing time they will be oversold in J by 10.
You can construct an infinite number of other hypothetical possibilities and drive yourself mad in the process. It is very possible that nobody in BA is thinking about this flight consciously in the way that these potential rationalisations do, because the algorithms have been programmed and BA people just let them get on with it.
Your supposition also starts from the unspoken premise that BA was selling this flight on the basis that there are 14F seats. But on a 14F/86J/30W/145Y aircraft, BA might always have planned to sell it on the basis of (say) a selling configuration of 10F/80J/30W/155Y. The availability numbers would always be based on that, rather than 14F/86J/30W/145Y, but you could never know what the selling configuration was/is (as there's no reason why that can't change over time).