Flightstats and expertflyer....
 

Hey Guys,
I recently had to take a flight out of Dubai and was holding an existing ticket to went into one of their offices to get the date changed. After booking my seat as i am a gold card holder i asked the lady how full the flight was and she said it was overbooked in Economy...

This was of course good news for me so to reconfirm this i went on flight stats and expert flyer and they both however showed the flight as being wide open which i found very strange...

I checked this constantly closer to my flight and it was still showing it as wide open... I then checked in on line and made made my way to the airport when dropped off my bag i asked again and she said the flight was overbooked but they had not upgraded anyone as there were still some passengers to check in...


Sure enough at the boarding gate pleasantly my boarding pass made the beeping noise and the gentleman who took my boarding pass apologised to me and said 'I'm really sorry sir you seat is no longer available so we have had to move you up front to business class!'


I enjoyed the flight thoroughly ofcourse but my issue is as the flight was clearly overbooked why was it not showing on any of these sites?? Or am i missing something? It clearly showed me 9s available for all classes on Economy...

Hope someone can shed some light on to this... Or is it possible Emirates are keeping this information from these websites??? In this case is it really worth paying for these websites??

Opinions and advice highly appreciated...

I have posted again and again that Expertflyer is not accurate on EK and particularly on SV. Yes, one reason could be that a flight had to be deplaned/ rebooked or simply was delayed and the connection couldn't reached, hence all booking on that particular flight. But every week I see inaccuracies even when sitting with / calling my TA.

Also, the fact that we change the POS (Point of Sale) from US to UK does not help. I can't even post and don't want to post several times when there are discrepancies between EF and the TA's GDS for flight booking :(

It may be that EK was still overselling the flight, either way the agent obviously had access to the real inventory of the flight which may be different then what EK shows the outside world.

It would be helpful to know what POS you in fact are using if it's not USA/UK. ExpertFlyer uses the same reservation systems that every TA uses, so it would be a point of sale issue if that is different.

The problem is that EK varies availability greatly based on POS. In markets with low yields, they even stop sales before the cabin is full, while in markets with high yields they keep selling seats. EF is accurate as far as seat maps, fares and award inventory go, but it is pretty useless for flight availability unless your ticket is ex- UK/ US.

Just asked my TA and he is telling me that it is Sabre and based in Dubai.

You can also use the EK POS gaming to your favor. I am now regularly POS-hopping in order to get a seat on full flights. Case in point: Just the other day, I was able to secure a cheap economy seat for DXB-RUH less than 24h before departure by calling a TA in Germany ("1 seat left") instead of trusting EK in DXB ("fully booked").

What is the strategy of EK behind this? They do this for a reason, right?

+1 :confused:

Didnt understand this .. why should they stop selling seats even before cabin is full for markets with low yeilds ?
Flight availability is inaccurate in EF/ Flightstats only for EK or also for other big airlines (like LH, SQ,TG etc) ?

If you have 2 F seats left, you'd rather sell them to someone purchasing an expensive F fare ex- USA/ DXB than someone purchasing a much cheaper F fare ex- South Asia.

That makes perfect sense if the POS (point of sales) is in South Asia. But in my case |(and the example above) the POS is Dubai. And I recall, prices ex-DXB are expensive.

Last week, I was set to fly RUH - FRA on LH 621. On said Wednesday morning, 15th of June I expected a wide opened flight with booking classes all >9 on all Y classes and whilst switching between US and UK PoS.

Accordingly I assigned myself a aisle seat in the middle row in the back of the plane highly prepared for a more light load in Y.

The last time I checked on Expertflyer was 4h before the flight.

When I arrived at the check in, the agent told me that it is overbooked by some pax!

Indeed, when I went to the cabin it was a Zoo with every single seat taken - the FA told me that when she left FRA for RUH (flight goes on to DOH) she already knew it was overbooked.

How can this happen again? EF showed wide-opened on Y but it was overbooked by already a few days?

Really, I am more than ok to pay the Premium fare every month but not giving me valid results is not giving me the service I was asking for in the first place.

Unhappy customer!

Hi GigoloArt, the Flight Availability results note how many tickets the airline is willing to sell, now how many seats are still available. It is possible that showing 9's 4 hrs before the flight is EK's way of overselling the flight, or, it could be that way once the flight goes under airport control.

Also, what did the seat map look like for the flight? Sometimes you have to use both the seat map and the availability results together to determine what the real availability of a flight is, especially that close to departure.

Thanks for your reply.

The FA on the flight saw on her preliminary pax manifest that her outbound flight was oversold. This was 12h prior to my departure (inbound for her). Thus, while the flight was oversold, EF still showed plenty of room. I indeed checked the seat map and it was 50-65% occupied only.

It just does not work.

You can have a full flight with unassigned seats, so it's one point of information, but not always a useful one. Either way, we are showing the information that EK is making available to every travel agent in the world, so EK was still trying to further oversell the flights or there was a problem on their end with publishing the information.

It was LH and not EK.