Odd availability listings - more R than C or D
 

I was looking at fare bucket availability for some upcoming flights and I noticed some odd patterns in CE where R is fully open at R9 but the some of the higher fare buckets are filling up. For example:

J9 C9 D3 R9
or
J9 C6 D2 R9

Is it usual to keep offering lots of discounted/restricted seats whilst reducing the number of semi-flex seats available? Or, is this about pushing those looking for semi-flex towards fully flex J?

This is a fairly complex area but it's not so unusual.
- it could be just a temporary blip while some sales go through and in a few hours will readjust itsel
- BA may be splitting off leisure and business travel. The more inflexible tickets may be unsuitable for business travellers. e.g. have minimum stay requirements, whereas BA doesn't mind taking some very inflexible bookings (knowing that a percentage will be no-show).
- there may be married segments behind this
- they may not want to have a group of 4 in D - so they'll extract more money out of them first.
- and an R fare could easily be more expensive than a D.

But the biggest issue that we have to bear in mind is that while we may be looking at just one flight and its buckets, the real world is more complex. If you are doing
NCL-LHR-JFK-SYR [date1]
ORD-LHR-NCL [date2]
then it may well be that only C will compute for that combination for all sorts of reasons.

Don't forget the uses some of these buckets have apart from controlling prices. J and R classes for example are often permitted on feeder flights to long-haul flights in I class so that tighter availability on a short-haul sector does not prevent BA from selling a potentially way more expensive long-haul itinerary. This gets even more complex on code-share through bookings. AA for example booking in I class long haul will permit I or D buckets on the short-haul feeder. Airlines can control how much inventory is used this way and hold back vital inventory for their own use rather than a code-share partner. You don't mention which sector you are looking at, but I suspect it's a short-haul sector with a lot of connecting traffic, possibly also from code-share partners not necessarily in the JB.

It's observable on MAN-LHR and LHR-MAN on several dates.

I guess it's just another example of fare bucket lists hiding more of a story than at first appears.

That explains it then. IMHO this is BA favouring connecting traffic.

I'm normally only looking at these availability lists for things like F9 J9 W0 Y0 for example if I'm in WTP so that I can get hopeful about opups :-)

Although my long haul flight next week is showing 9 in every bucket and I'm the only person in WTP on the seatmap, so I think that flight is a bit empty and I'll be staying in WTP. (It's only LHR-JFK and WTP is good enough for an east coast daytime flight.)

There's a flight in just over a month I'm keeping an half an eye on the AMS-LHR route at the moment, which is showing J9 C0 D0 R0 I9... not good when I want to do an OnBusiness redemption on it :(. Plenty of Avios availability but can't fit the person in my family & friends list, so...