StormDog

Thanks CWS - Appreciate the help. Early start to airport check-in tomorrow am.

Giblets

Well, now at Bronze, and off to Paris Tomorrow, managed to reserve a seat yesterday .... only for BA to change it today anyway!

luitje

Connecting to the US bound flight in LHR tomorrow and while I was able to OLCI for the first leg, getting this message for the second segment: "Sorry, we are unable to offer you online check-in for this flight. To check in and receive your boarding pass, please proceed to an airport check-in desk."
Is that SSSS (I remember last time I had it the message was something along the lines "your reservation is fine but you have to collect your BP at the airport") or an indication of a possible flight cancellation / overbooking?

golfmad

Which flight is it?

luitje

BA049

golfmad

Ok. That's the flight to SEA which is showing:

F0 A0 J8 C0 D0 R0 I0 W8 E0 T0 Y9 B9H7 K5 M2 L0 V0 S0 N0 Q0 O0 G9

Which cabin are you in?

luitje

CW

golfmad

I wouldn't be too concerned about it being overbooked.

luitje

My bigger concern is a potential cancellation. I know flights on the 8th still operated, so fingers crossed this is just SSSS.

Amil

Grr its not letting me check in for my flight tmw. LAX-LHR BA 280

CKBA

OLCI unavailable for our IAD-LHR flight today - and showing F0 A0 J0 C0 D0 R0 I0 W0 E0 T0 Y2 B1 H0 K0 M0 L0 V0 S0 N0 Q0 O0 G0 so clearly a full flight.

Originally booked out of BWI, but rebooked out of IAD, (in WTP) a few months ago, shortly afterwards informed of aircraft change that cut WTP from 40-ish seats (which was pretty full even then) down to 24 seats - so clearly now over booked. Even more oddly, still being 'offered' an upgrade to CW (for $585 each) just 20 hours before the flight in what appears to be an oversold cabin on a full flight... .

Globaliser

You simply can't know from these figures whether or not CW is overbooked, let alone oversold. And that is why I frequently say that trying to use availability figures for such purposes is little better than reading tea leaves.

Just to give you one example: BA might have (say) 50 physical CW seats available and only expect 40 people to turn up, but has nevertheless zeroed both CW and F because it knows that it will have to op-up at least 10 people from WT to WT+ and at least 10 people from WT+ to CW, and it doesn't want to IDB anyone. In that situation, the offer to you as a WT+ passenger is that if you pay $585, you'll definitely win first prize in that lottery. If you don't want to pay it, well, then how lucky do you feel?

CKBA

...don't think I said that CW was oversold - WTP was: when I rebooked about 35 seats out of 44 had already been taken, so when the aircraft change came presumably they still had 35 WTP pax for only 24 seats (the aircraft having gone from 14F/56J/44W/185Y to 17F/48J/24W/127Y). I only included the fare-basis numbers to show it was a full flight overall.

My point (if I had one) was that BA was still 'offering' WTP-CW upgrades for $585pp, when it is clear they will have to upgrade at least 11 pax anyway but yes, it would solve their seating issue if these 11(+) WTP pax took up that offer and handed over an extra c.$6k.

(It does remind me of car rental companies (particularly in the US) from whom you have booked a car and when you turn up say what you booked is unavailable and will haggle with you to upgrade, knowing that in fact the original one is still available...).

Globaliser

Apologies for having misunderstood what you wrote.

As always, the number of physical seats available for allocation or marked as occupied tells you relatively little about booking levels, let alone about overbooking or oversales levels. So, for example, even if the 35 "occupied" seats meant that BA held exactly 35 reservations at that time, that could still be consistent with BA expecting 24 pax to check-in and board - hence neither overbooked (until the aircraft change) nor oversold (even after the aircraft change).

I think it's pretty clear that BA uses POUG (or the equivalent mechanism when offered at OLCI) to encourage people to pay to get a confirmed upgrade even when they might have to be op-upped anyway. The "free upgrade" thread is full of stories of people who saw an upgrade offer at check-in and declined it, and then got op-upped anyway. Hence the reference to buying your way to the head of the lottery prize collection. But at no point in this process does BA pretend to the passenger that their originally-booked cabin is unavailable - unlike your car rental example, which seems close to being fraudulent.

golfmad

No but you said it appears to be oversold and your conclusions were drawn from that. The main point is that the figures available publicly for us to see are not the full facts and all we can do is draw inferences from them rather than final conclusions.

It will be interesting to hear back from you when you fly with an update.