They will also reduce F capacity if Y is getting full.

It did not appear that IRROPS were likely (at least to me).

That is what I was thinking.

Definitely. "Cabin borrowing"

Does AA still hold back 1-2 F seats for sale and/or IRROPS, btw, until around ~30 minutes before departure? I know pmAA used to do that, but pmUS didn't.

Someone mentioned this happening in the "has AA eliminated the upgrade window" thread and there was speculation that AA has begun artificially decreasing F availability in order to hold back upgrades

Doesn't seem like there'd be any point to messing with F availability for that purpose. If they want to hold back upgrades, they can just hold back upgrades.

Hold back from upgrades, yes. Within 4 hours of departure an agent must manually process the upgrade regardless.

Agreed. There's virtually never any X or R inventory anyway except for split seconds when upgrades clear.

F5 Yet only 3 Unassigned Seats
 

Not sure how this happens.

I'm looking at AA 73 on Aug 24th, and EF is showing F5 but looking at the seat map, it only shows 3 unassigned seats in F??

Seats can get blocked for more reasons than a confirmed passenger.

Get that, but F5 means that there is more inventory for sale than there is "indicated" space, and AA generally speaking doesn't oversell F, especially on Int'l routes.

Yes, but for example 3 seats could be blocked simply because they might not know which 2 of those 3 seats would be available and which one wouldn't be available at flight time. So they would have to block all 3 from advance seat assignment, but that wouldn't mean that 2 of those 3 cannot be sold.

Seat maps are not a good judgement (in either direction) of how many seats are actually available for booking. There are many reasons why a seat map may show more seats than are available for sale, and there are several reasons why a seat map may show less seats than are available for sale.

Discrepancy between aa.com vs. Expert Flyer
 

I'm flying GRU-JFK on AA 950 tonight. I have an SWU waitlisted for Y to J. Expert flyer lists F4 J7 Y4, but the upgrade still hasn't cleared. An unusual delay IME. In addition, if I search for F, J, or Y availability on the flight using aa.com or google.com/flights I find no availability at all. Any idea why this might be or what I should do? Another interesting datapoint is that aa.com says it has just 2 seats available in J for 962, GRU-DFW but EF lists J7.

If you mean AA.com says something like "Only 2 seats left" on the page where you select flights, all that means is there are 2 seats left at that price. There could be more at a higher price. If you're going off the seat map, some seats might be blocked for selection until check-in for some reason.

As for what you should do, I'd say just wait and see if you clear the upgrade. Not much you can proactively do, especially on the day of departure.

Yes, it says "only two seats left." Good to know that that isn't what I thought it was. The rest of the above is not based on seat maps at all, but rather on EF results. Any insights on the discrepancy between EF and aa.com on 950? EF says there is space and aa.com isn't selling anything in all classes. I fly this flight often and I'm fairly confident that if J were truly > 4 on day of departure I would have been upgraded ages ago. I fear that this is an EF bug, but want to rule out some AA based explanation.

A similar issue was reported last month:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amer...s-morning.html

EF company rep said the problem could be on the AA.com side due to "caching." Doesn't explain why the phone rep also saw no availability in that case, though.