Is this strange or not? J4, but seat map shows ZERO?
 

Not really much to add, but I'm on DFW-FRA and EF shows J4/R4, and can still buy J seats on AA.com. However... the seat map shows that all of the seats are assigned.

Is this normal? I don't recall having seen this before, certainly many times where there were more seats unassigned than available on EF.

What would cause this? Greater than 4 blocked seats (in this case)?

My eVIP did clear, but thought this odd.

Any thoughts?

If there are more than 4 F seats, they will continue to sell J seats (full J, not discounted), and op-up people later.

I actually thought of this too... but F is showing F2. Should have maybe mentioned that option in the OP.

Row 8 on the 777 are always Z-blocked, and unlike a few months ago, I've only seem them released by GA (or at checkin) in recent past. So, two known blocked + 2 free F = 4J for sale! Who knows for sure though - besides AA!

The number of F seats for sale doesn't really mean anything here. It's quite possible that of the 16 F seats, only 12 are sold, 2 are "reserved" for Op-ups and 2 are still for sale. You can't tell from the information provided. You could try to use the F seat map to guess, but we know those aren't always 100% accurate.

That doesn't make sense, though. Wouldn't they rather try to sell four F seats if they could, and then just reduce the number of J seats for sale every time an F seat fills up?

I've thought that, too (that is, for every F seat that's available, offer to sell either an F seat or a J seat), but apparently AA's systems don't allow for that. And AA knows that it's much more likely to sell an incremental J seat than an incremental F seat.

By the way, what date is this flight? An easy way to test the theories below is go on AA.com, put an F seat on hold and see what it does to the availability of J seats (promptly releasing the hold so someone can actually buy the seat).

DFW-FRA is probably long enough to require pilot rest seats in F.

With two blocked in J, they can sell 4 in Business as long as there are 2 F seats. Obviously they'd rather sell F, but the flexibility to oversell Business in the meantime allows for F cancellations...

The date of travel is Jan 30. Now EF shows F2 and J2, while seat map still shows zero.

I guess now J2 and zero makes sense because of the hold on row 8?

F seat map show 8 unassigned seats, but I know that is not unusual for F2.

THey must have had a bunch of recent cancellations, I now see F2 A1 J7 on the 1/30 DFW-FRA.

Seems like its just yield management doing their job. They probably have a the formula down as to how many people cancel/change their plans a few days prior to a trip - likely even for a given day of the week.

If you look at a number of airlines', IM link full fare business and F room - they'll oversell J if they have F room available and an F purchase/cancellation changes both the F and J availability.

Well, if I had to guess, I'd say J was already overbooked at that point, and they were willing to overbook it even more.

I think I"ve seen J6 or J7 and no seats available on some flight in the past.

No seats available is not necessarily the same thing as all seats taken.

For a simple example (though I don't know if it could apply to this case), it can be that they don't yet know what exact equipment they'll use for that flight, and the seat maps for the different metals being considered are incompatible. Until they resolve that, they can't assign anyone a particular seat, not even the first person to book that cabin.