You can't tell what seats have been sold, but you can tell a bit about availability.

First, you have to change your profile on the united.com website so you are in expert mode.

Second, you can create an itinerary for the flights you are interested in. In expert mode, the availability lists the number of seats (up to 9 max) that the airline is willing to sell. If it says something like F3 A1 Y9 B9 M9 H4 V2 W1 S0 .. that means the airline is wiling to sell 3 F tix, 1 A ticket, 9 Y tickets, etc. It doesn't mean that any or all of those seats are available, it just means that's how many they will sell, and purchasing one can and will affect the other buckets. You can only make general assumptions about availability based on these numbers because of yield management .. the airlines sell more tickets than there are seats because of no-shows, delays, etc, and usually do a good job of yield management. In general, the airline won't share information about the actual number of unsold seats because they consider that to be priviledged, competitive information.

From there, if you select flights, you get to a screen from which you can do seat selection. That screen will show you which seats are available for selection at this time, but it also has no bearing on how many actual seats are available either, since not everybody reserves a seat and many seats are blocked or held back for airport assignment.

One of these screens tells you the equipment type for the flight, but again, that's only a generic indication of the equipment type. If it's a 757, then you know what the configuration will be, but if it's a 777 or 747, there are different configurations available, especially for international flights. Generally the last digit of the equipment shows the model of that plane. For example, 763 is a 767-300. 744 is a 747-400. You can use the seat maps on united.com to see typical seat maps for all the planes theh fly.

-David


[This message has been edited by LIH Prem (edited 06-15-2001).]