<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by nationalflyer:
I need some help here. How do you find out how many First Class seats are available on a flight without being booked in First? </font>
It is hard to find out exactly how many seats are truly available.
One rough guide used to be to look at the seat map and see how many unoccupied seats there were, but bear in mind that not everyone with a confirmed first class reservation (whether upgraded or purchased full fare) has a seat assignment yet -- and since the new upgrade routine went into effect, this is an even more common situation. So, just because there are empty seats on a seat map does not mean that there are that many available first class seats.
The second method is to look at an inventory availability display, which can be done using the expert mode at itn.net. It will show how many seats remain available to sell in any given inventory bucket, but it won't show any more than 9. Therefore, if there are more than 9 seats available you won't know it. For example, if it's a 22 seat first class cabin and only five reservations exists, there are 17 seats available but the display will still only show F9 (meaning, nine seats available in F). Now, if there are less than 9 seats left to sell, then this becomes a very accurate tool. If it says F6, then you know there are only six first class seats remaining, regardless of what any seat map says.