lwpowers

I continue to research options my planned December trip from IAD-DXB-BKK. I did by enough miles at 40% off to upgrade to Business.

But, I am wondering if the flights are mostly empty and I would be better off saving my miles for the return trip or another time. Is there a way to tell if EK232 and EK384 are flying mostly empty and I can have a whole economy row to myself?

iFlyMoreThanYou

Seat maps won't tell you anything
availability won't tell you anything

There is no public information that you can use to determine how full / empty a flight is

Send me a DM instead

aceboy44

It's ironic how you "fly more than" me, yet you don't know about expertflyer

iFlyMoreThanYou

please enlighten us how you can derive load factor from expertflyer

m3red

it’s not fool proof but you can tell if a flight is busy on EF

Not like the accurate and confidential information you are obtaining from your “friend” who shouldn’t be sharing it

LondonElite

At the time you need to commit to buying the ticket neither you nor the airline will know if the flight is empty enough for you to have a full row to yourself.

iFlyMoreThanYou

You can't. Seats are shown as "taken" in EF when they're actually blocked. You can't use seat maps. On top of that availability doesn't say anything either anymore as all RM controls have been removed. So good look with determining that, you are spreading inaccurate information, which is against Flyertalk policy.

And, accurate information? i thought i was just trolling everyone here?

thijsseh

Expert Flyer gives you the ‘availability’, the number of seats the airline is prepared to sell in the various fare buckets. This will give a relatively inaccurate view of how full the flights is, for instance if the airline is prepared to sell ‘at least’ 9 seats in a low fare bucket in a specific cabin, it suggests that the flight is - at that stage - expected to be relatively empty (in that cabin). I have purposely built in many caveats in the above sentence. If the availability shows zeros for all fare buckets in a cabin, the airline thinks it will be full (even after no shows, an issue I don’t want to get into).


The seat map is completely useless for this purpose in the Y cabin as many passengers have to pay for seat selection and rather wait until OLCI. For J and F it’s a bit closer to the truth (although of course H fare bucket does not get free seat selection either). Seats with an ‘X’ in them are blocked and there is no way of telling what their ‘status’ will be on departure.

Would I use EF to make decisions the OP is asking about? No, I would not. But with experience and some brain usage, EF will give a small (and sometimes useful) insight.

ElJudioErrante

One way to find out if you really want to go through all the effort and paperwork is to go through the procedure and contact EK "groups" and request availability etc for a large group. I very much doubt if they will tell you "group availability" immediately, however in past this has worked with me asking other carriers. Worth remembering too that groups often have a complicated itinerary and not just a simple OW/RT one.

Will08

I have had every single variation happen to me over the last couple of years to realise how limited expert flyer is. I had seen flights jump up and down from Y9 to Y0 back up to 9, flights that have looked completely full where I thought I was guaranteed an op up to find myself stuck downstairs. Flights that have looked empty and then seen my boarding pass change in the lounge. Also under normal circumstances there are a lot of daily flights in to BKK which means there are so many reasons as to why flight loads can change dramatically.

In this instance, unless the rules change by December it is not likely for the DXB-BKK flight to be particularly busy, as for the Op have you booked a decent ASQ hotel?

m3red

having used EF for years and looked at the fares on routes I fly often, between the fare buckets and the seat maps 24/48 hours out you have a good sense of where things will sit. The routes that are tricky used to be dxb hkg where it would be full but still F4 J4 and Y9 because of the tremendous amount of missed connections / no shows and the fact that there are so many flights that if it’s full they can move people to the next one (in the good old days).

iFlyMoreThanYou

availability calculations do not depend on potential missed connections and ability to rebook onto next flights. Flights are determined independently. Pick up a book on revenue management. Try "the theory and practice of revenue management" by talluri and van ryzin, that covers the algorithms used by EK and 95% of other airlines int the world. Misinformation again.

m3red

are you saying the fact they have a flight going a few hours later means they won’t oversell the previous one?

iFlyMoreThanYou

you don't believe me anyway - read the book. The biggest 3 RM vendors in the industry all use it.

m3red

is this why you can’t afford private covid tests?