Originally Posted by
MaxVO
Thanks for the explanation, especially the last sentence. I see nothing preventing airlines from emptying some buckets and creating new ones. And that's their mechanism for responding to market intelligence, including searches and aborted searches.
Yes, but only some of the time do whole buckets appear (go from 0 to maximum) or disappear (go from maximum to 0) all at once. Much of the time the numbers change by 1 or 2 or 3 at a time, and if you pay close attention to the seating chart, you can tell that some people are cancelling and some people are making new bookings.
That didn't use to happen as much pre-Covid, because pre-Covid business fares were all that existed in the last two weeks or so.