Originally Posted by HNLbasedFlyer

I'm curious why you think a lot of people don't select a seat, especially up front? Does some sort of research suggest this? Upgrades auto-assign you a seat. All the major booking sites either force you into a booking path to select seats or make it very easy to select a seat - I'm having a hard time believing people are buying F and deliberately and actually going out of their way to not choose a seat.

Originally Posted by jsloan

Years of comparing load factors / inventory data to seat maps. They don't match.

Sometimes they don't match because seats are being blocked. Sometimes they don't match because people don't have an assigned seat. Sometimes they don't match and I can't figure out why (e.g,, more seats are assigned than inventory data suggests are sold). But if you're trying to judge your upgrade chances, you want inventory data, not the seat map.