I had a very difficult seat to ticket. My mother has to be in Sapporo on 3 May and instead of following my brother's family up via NGO on 2 May, insisted on flying direct on 1 May.

Furthermore for a <5 hour flight she insisted on flying "better than economy". The 74K that normally serves the route has been swapped out for a 77Z that day so it's business or nothing.

The fare our TA came up with was full J with $29K R/T, with a $5K reduction for ticketing the NGO-HKG in W and upgrading it to U with 10K AM.

This was months ago. The ticketing deadline was Thu 24 Apr. I newly acquired KVS and saw availability go less and less (something like J2 Y0). To issue the return itinerary cost $32K at CX.com.

TA told me she saw upgrade availability but cannot take advantage of it at Y0. I told TA to go ticket the J.

I think I looked again on Sat 26 Apr. The availability was J0 Y0 so I thought the flight was jam packed. There were three empty business seats in seat map but I didn't thought much of it.

So you can understand my fury when this morning's KVS availability looked like this:

J7 C7 D6 I6 Y9 B9 H9 K9 M9 L9 V9 G9 S9 N9 Q9 O9

And 4 U seats became available.

I can't accuse CX of doing something illegal (I don't think even the new competition ordinance catches CX out on this one). But I really wish there's more competition to keep CX honest and stop it from sculping customers like this.

what makes you think they didnt have a huge tour party cancel

Have to agree with this. +1

A lot of Y seats, sure. A lot of J seats, sure. A lot of both? What kind of tour group is that?

Also, what reason to canx such a big group? No nuclear incident of late, no sinking of Chinese ships by japan.

Furthermore, are tour groups allowed to keep space up to T-2? Any penalty? If none, it's just a massive invitation to hog space like Urban Council tennis courts used to get hogged by coaches.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B142 Safari/8536.25)

Maybe just a pvg flight gotten delayed. They dont benefit from j0y0

Pvg can't connect to cx580 09:35 without an overnight. Earliest flight from pvg/sha is 10:10 (ka857).

If it's pvg transit pax doing overnight anyway why not put them on even earlier flight?

When Y gets overbooked, it will reduce the number of J seats too. To the worst extent, the entire flight is overbooked and sold out, J will also become 0.

oops i just read the post properly... was txting whilst driving!

anyways, had agencies hacked the space earlier, they might canx the flight! anywys, i see your pain!

Interesting theory but doesn't match the facts - Y was booked out/(withdrawn from sale) first - as of 24 Apr I saw J2 Y0

Most of the time, when it gets close to the departure date, CX begins releasing J inventory to Y. Some Y passengers will get op-upped.

When they overbooked two more Y, they released the two J to Y inventory (J2Y0->J2Y2), which was immediately taken and J2 will become J0 (J2Y2->J0Y0). If it were J0Y2, then there would be no overbooking.

That makes sense to me. Y goes 0 first, then slowly eats into J.

My guess is that they had enough overbookings to swap in a 77Z, which has a lot more seats than the 74K. The said 74K then took over the other route which probably wasn't fully booked.

cxfan1960: OK I get your theory.

Awesom Andy: I first created the itinerary in February. It was 77Z already then.

The price of tickets varies depending on when you purchase them. This has been a well known concept for years and I'm sorry you just now found out about this practice. Hopefully you will keep this in mind for your next booking.

Why cancel late? Well, there are a million reason all from "Team didn't make the playoff" to "little Lisa got sick".

Often times it's not the fault of CX. I've seen TAs hold tickets for prolonged periods of time and releasing them shortly before departure

I find from the times I'm watching ExpertFlyer for various reasons that availability does all sorts of bizarre things in the three days leading up to departure. It's interesting to see some theories/explanations for why that is. (In particular, the lower fare buckets almost always seem to open suddenly. Perhaps that's because, as someone says, they release some seats in higher cabins for those booking codes to facilitate irrops etc if they expect not to sell them anyway.)