Pricing and seat availability changes
 

Hi. First post, so I apologize if this has been addressed previously. But, I'm hoping to get some feedback on this. I booked 4 tickets from CVG to MCO roundtrip for April about 4 weeks ago. I had been tracking 2 particular flights, as I am flying with my 4 and 6 year-old nieces and wanted to make sure we were able to get direct flights at particular times, with seats together. When I checked seat availability, the website showed only about 6 seats left for both flights, so I went ahead and booked them (I would never have booked this early otherwise). However, when I checked this week (because I'm a weirdo and like to make sure I made a good decision), the tickets were $120 less and the flight was showing nearly full availability. I know I'm well past the point of any sort of refund, but I feel a bit mislead by the seating availability. I probably would have held off a bit longer, if I'd known that there were plenty of seats still open. Is this just part of the flight booking game or do I have a reason to be annoyed? Thanks in advance.

I haven't ever seen them block seats on the seating chart (other than the C+ bulkhead seats for handicapped folks and the last N rows of the plane for gate control). I'm not a Delta apologist and anything is possible. Therefore these are just guesses based on things that do happen frequently and offer a less "conspiratorial" explanation:

1. Frequently a message indicating "only N seats remaining at this price" appears on the booking page. That's true at that point in time, but it does not prevent other fare buckets (and in fact lower fare buckets) from being opened later.

2. It's possible there was an aircraft swap? If your original flights were on a smaller plane and your new flights are on a larger plane it could look like there is relatively more availability.

Welcome to FlyerTalk! :)

By chance, did you happen to notice the seat map only had 6 seats left on a weekend? Delta does schedule changes during the weekends and they sometimes block out a large part of the seat map.

Unless you mean the website, under the price for your flight, said something like "only 6 seats left at this price". In that case, Delta likely opened up seats in a lower fare bucket.

I do the same thing you do (check flights after I book them). I think a lot of us on here have the philosophy that if you book a ticket at a good price for you, then you did good, and you shouldn't look back. Of course, if you continue to hang out here, you may learn some tricks ;)

I think at times the seatmaps can be kind of buggy/balky with DL's IT. Schedule change Saturdays in particular, as FlyerWx notes.

I had a four-segment, three part trip have the seatmaps all lock up today over a 5 minute schedule change. All segments were 'view only' including one 12 days after the segment with the 5 min change, starting late Sat evening. Odd.
I ended up calling the Plat desk this a.m. on an unrelated RUC request and then did an 'oh by the way' and after she looked at my impacted ITN, and a couple holds, she said she had talked with Online and they were debugging based on the issue I had the misfortune of discovering.

Welcome to FT! As others have said, seat maps can be buggy especially over the weekend. Sorry for the frustration!

Thanks for the feedback! It was on a weekend (I booked on a Sunday), so perhaps that was the issue. And I was checking the Delta seating chart myself (no "6 seats left" notification). Although, I had actually ended up calling customer service to book my flights, since I payed for 2 seats with my miles and 2 seats outright. I had mentioned to the SkyMiles customer service agent that I noticed there were limited seats left, and he didn't correct me. Maybe just an oversight? Again, thanks for the responses. Not much I can do about it now, so live and learn, right? :)

Could have been a group booking that was cancelled within the 24 hour cancellation period.

If you do not have status then designated "preferred" seats may not show up. The other possiblity is that some tour company might have a block of seats and sometime between your booking and your recent search they advised that Delta that all or a portion of that block were not needed. Also, it is possible that Delta held some of those seats for E fares and if those were tracking below predicted numbers they just released into general inventory