Just curious to know the boards thoughts on this recent experience.

Checked in late (1.5 hours before departure) on an A380 flight DXB-MAN in Y recently. Flight boarded totally full in Y, yet just 2 hours before departure they were still selling Economy Saver seats in Y.

I was hoping for an upgrade (gold) as i was on a flex plus fare.

Firstly i cant understand how i was seq 525, when there are only a maximum of 517 seats on an EK A380?

Staff tickets on standby also receive a SEQ number so it could have been a lot of staff who did not make the flight after trying to be accepted.

If J was full, then there would be nowhere to upgrade to. So, they'd then start offloading non-status passengers.

Also, just because 525 have checked-in, that doesn't mean 525 will show up. Meetings get cancelled, people get ill etc.

Also, if you are on a flight that transits somewhere, those joining in the transit point sequence numbers don't start from 1, they start from where ever the numbers ended at the point on origin. My recent flight BKKHKG had a sequence number in the 600's, for example.

Take ek19 if you want y to j - always over in y and often a few left in j

Infants, standbys, transits, offloads.

Are crew ticked as well?

As in the operating crew on the flight? No - sequence numbers are mainly used as the quickest way of referring to an entry on passenger manifest* by ground staff. After all, duplicate names do crop up rather more frequently than you might think!

* the manifest in the computer at any particular time might not be the same as the final manifest that gets printed off and delivered to the plane when a flight is finalised of course.

very interesting, i had always assumed sequence number was a much more accurate way of knowing how many people were actually on the flight.

Any explanation as to why just an hour before the flight they were still selling the cheapest available Y fare, when the flight looked totally full, and indeed departed totally full in Y

The dark arts of revenue management at work: that department knows the profile of passengers on that sector (as in, how much they like to spend, how soon they buy them in advance etc.) as well as projected standby/non-rev fares as well as cargo payload. What looks like totally full in Y may only be 90% paying customers, or it may have been overbooked, but EK know that route doesn't sell last minute J or F fares, but does sell last minute Y fares, but only at x price, so opens even inventory at >100% capacity in Y and pushes people up to J (or F as required).

Last minute cheapest available Y fares strikes me more as "there is little chance we can get any extra expensive fares so we might as well open an offer up and see if anyone bites". No revenue manager worth his/her salt wants to allow staff tickets on board It is quite not uncommon on EK for staff to get offloaded even when there are seats available because some revenue paying cargo business has come their way at the last minute (or for instance, lots and lots of pax baggage and juicy excess charges that come with it).