Originally Posted by
jsloan
The flight status pulls from the flight load numbers, not the sales inventory. It’s not the datapoint you want or need during IRROPS. You need to know if you can purchase a seat on the flight, which can happen even when it says the flight is Full. It’s also possible — but rarer — to show standby Available but not be able to purchase a ticket; this happens when UA is trying to get a handle on loads by turning off new purchases.
It’s not possible for the app “not to be able to keep up.” The app and the agents’ systems both make real-time calls into SHARES in order to secure a seat. (There may be search result inventory caching, but if there is, it’s a very short duration — maybe 5-15 seconds — because I’ve definitely refreshed inventory and seen it change very quickly. What happened was that inventory for the flight you wanted opened between the time you tried it in the app and the time you called.
Originally Posted by
npei
Ah, good info. I got on the new flight when it open up 1 seat during my call with agent. An even earlier flight that I prefer (but unable to change yet) shows standby FULL, but agent said keep watching app every hour if necessary.
Of course @jsloan is correct. To add to it, it's also the reason why you can select a flight to change to in the UA app but then get an error saying it's not available. At the time the app pulled data for flight availability on aaa-bbb SHARES said it was available. But it doesn't hold the inventory - it simply shows what's open "at that moment". Once you attempt to confirm your change it will do a final inventory check to make sure it can sell that flight. If the answer from SHARES comes back "no" then the app errors out and your change will not go through.
What I mentioned above is likely to happen a lot over the next 48-72 hours while everybody jockeys their flights around trying to get from A to B. I was very surprised UA didn't put up the waiver through the 27th but instead decided to wait until the heavy snow was already falling and they realized how bad the snow would be in IAD/EWR that they finally extended it. I'm personally keeping my flights through EWR on the 27th and hoping for the best.
-RM