Billy Mumphrey

Just curious what's happening here, as I haven't seen it before. Have an award reservation to fly to JFK tomorrow, for me (DM), my wife (GM), and daughter (no status). Called earlier to SDC to a later flight, and the agent was nice enough to waive the $75 fee for my daughter. Nice surprise. The flight I wanted had 3 F seats available for sale, but 8 open F seats on the seat map. Not that unusual, since I assumed several F passengers just hadn't picked a seat yet. After the SDC was complete I asked the agent to split my wife off onto her own PNR. My daughter and I were immediately upgraded to F, as was my wife. Nice surprise #2 . Now that I'm booked on the later flight, when I look at the upgrade list it says there are still 5 F seats available. But the flight is still sold out in F if I try to book a seat on the website. Is Delta holding back F inventory, and if so, why? There are plenty of seats available in Y as well, so it's not like the flight is even close to being at capacity.

ijgordon

The upgrade standby list on the app shows unassigned seats, not seats available for sale. Doesn’t make any sense, but that’s how it is.

A service like ExpertFlyer could show you the actual availability in this case.

GeorgeBurdell

There are a number of views into the Delta seat inventory system depending on whether you're trying to buy or upgrade, etc. Seats have one or more fare classes assigned to them and these determine what can be done with the seats. Upgrades are a different set of fare classes from paid seats. To my knowledge, the only way to see what's close to the true open inventory in first is to look at the upgrade list in the mobile app. Even before the check-in window opens, it will display what's there even if Delta is blocking seats. There are web pages out there with listings of fare classes and descriptions. Expert Flyer used to have visibility into much more of the available fare classes but Delta locked them down a few years ago.

Billy Mumphrey

The 5 seats remained unassigned, and those same 5 seats were given out as upgrades at the gate. The entire time the F cabin was showing as "sold out". Still seems odd to me.

MSPeconomist

It seems odd to me that the new flight had only three FC seats for sale and then all three were given as upgrades before the gate. Normally DL would still be hoping to sell something like three FC seats, depending of course on the route, aircraft type, time and day.

metallo

Since you mention this is a "later" flight, is it possible DL was holding back seats to protect them for potential misconnects, so pax wouldn't end up stranded overnight? That's my best guess to explain the phenomenon described by the OP, although I don't believe he mentioned the specific routing.

I fly AA more than DL and have noticed AA doing something similar on later flights for routes like ORD-STL or LAX-SAN (last flight of the night from a hub to another domestic airport, where you may very well have high paying premium passengers connecting from overseas who need to make the connection to be able to get home or to work the next morning).

It may be more of a mess and lead to more re-accommodation expense and loss of passenger loyalty to DL if they were forced to accommodate high value connecting passengers overnight, as opposed to perhaps the potentially smaller amount of revenue they could gain from selling those seats as TOD upgrades or even day of departure F purchases.

In any case, I doubt the situation encountered by the OP was a fluke. I would think it's much less likely that this is a DL mistake/fluke and much more likely that the inventory management here was the result of perhaps quite intricate research-driven rationale.

Billy Mumphrey

It was DCA-JFK.

metallo

So, it could potentially be the reverse of what I suggested then (spoke to hub, rather than hub to spoke)... maybe there was a potential for something to go wrong with the earlier DCA-JFK flights, so later flights were being held for IROPS reaccommodation to reduce risk of having to reaccommodate passengers at DCA or JFK if they would miss the last INTL or transcon flights out of JFK that evening.

Pure speculation obviously, but as I mentioned, at least on other airlines, I have seen revenue management utilize this type of inventory control for flights later in the day.

The other time you'll see this is when coach is oversold, so rather than zeroing out coach, they'll open up coach inventory at the expense of premium cabin inventory (presumably because it's easier to sell - changing J3Y0 to J0Y3 may result in additional last-minute revenue), so they have to protect seats in the premium cabin(s) to make sure the entire flight across all cabins does not become too overbooked.

flyerCO

DL might've been holding seat, but I highly doubt they would be holding 5 seats. From DCA-JFK it's very possible that the seats had been booked but then passengers didnt fly.

ethernal

Unlikely - modern revenue management software takes a holistic look at inventory. Typically (if they still want to offer Y with only J seats left) it would just show both J3Y3 and if J sells then Y is also decremented (and the same in reverse). Zeroing out one bucket at the expense of another makes no sense - more likely to turn away a buyer that way.

metallo

You should tell AA and AS that it “makes no sense.”

Perhaps DL’s RM IT is light years ahead of these other major airlines who absolutely still do this... or perhaps it’s not.

MSPeconomist

I know PMNW used to sometimes proactively upgrade elites in order to create more coach seats to sell on the flight. The logic seemed to be that many companies permitted purchase of FULL Y but not FC fares, so they would be more likely to get last minute bookings inn coach.

Now, however, with real time inventory sales, it should be easy to code availability as either 3 F or 3 Y, with the understanding that when a seat is sold, inventory in both cabin class buckets will be reduced. The odds of a simultaneous sale of more than three seats would seem to be minuscule and even if it would happen, DL would still win after paying for VDB(s) if necessary since the fares what are being sold are so high.

ethernal

Simultaneous sales are impossible*. All final reservations/ticketing for pretty much every major airline still goes through an ACID-complaint database (which, in simple terms, means that the database guarantees that a 'double entry' so to speak is impossible). It's the same reason why - no matter how fast you click and how low latency your internet connection(s) are - you can't buy two low fare class tickets when only one is left in that cheap fare class.

* barring an egregious IT mistake

ethernal

I'll admit that I am not familiar with AA's revenue and inventory management platform, but I can almost guarantee you it is smart enough to do total available seat analysis/calculation when allocating fare buckets. AA has four-class planes (e.g., 777-300ER). Do you really think it is dumb enough to stop selling Y tickets just because all Y seats are filled while there are still 30+ First/Biz/Premium Economy seats left?

That said, just because there are 3 F seats available doesn't mean that they will still sell a Y seat (or vice versa). There are many instances on Delta where there is 1 available F seat in an overbooked situation where they are willing to sell an F ticket for $2000 but not a full-fare Y ticket.

metallo

No, I don't think it's that dumb. That's actually exactly what I stated above when I said that I have witnessed both AA and AS shift F/J to Y inventory in the case of Y oversells, essentially creating a scenario where there will be guaranteed upgrades for some passengers who paid for Y fares.

I think your point of contention was whether the inventory would still be available for F/J purchases, and, while I agree it would seemingly make more sense to ensure both premium cabin and coach seats remain available for purchase, I said I've seen plenty of instances on those airlines where that has not been the case... in other words, they zero out F/J and rely on the prospect of the Y inventory being purchased.