A colleague recently flew Paris to Dubai to Sydney. Both business and economy were nearly full. I was surprised. Is this an exception, or is this normal occupancy levels these days.

In short, yes.

In my experience these last few weeks, they've been cancelling frequencies with short notice -- I suspect both to save fuel and to maintain high load factors. I've had rotations on Milan, Hong Kong, Manila, Jakarta, etc. cancelled about 1-2 weeks before departure and re-booked onto the nearest departing flight, and the flights I end up flying are always bursting at the seams in all cabins (EK 381 on Sunday was empty in F, but ended up flying with 10/14 + 2 deadheading, and mostly full in J).

I�ve just discovered a fantastic app called Planepoints for iOS. It displays the load factor for each flight and the number of available seats per class. I was searching for my flight to San Francisco and it was completely full. I checked the flight map and compared them to the Emirates flight map and they were exactly the same.

It�s a great App but the number of airlines it supports is limited, especially given its price.

Doesn�t seem to do anything that Expert`Flyer does not do. EF has far more airlines. And other information (fares etc)
Neither display �load factor�, both show how many seats the airline will sell in any fare bucket, up to 9 in Y, 7 in J and 4 in F cabins.
Seems very unlikely that Planepoints will show �D� or �Z� availability when you pay for the �pro� version (EF used to do this, but sadly that disappeared many years ago). I�m not going to pay even $6.99 to find out.
I�m out, as they say.

Im flying from MIA -> DXB today. Was originally scheduled to fly yesterday, but they cancelled the flight and effectively merged it with today�s flight. Went from having loads of space across all cabins to being full in PE/Biz and decent load in Economy too.

From speaking to others this seems quite common these days.

Hey everyone - Dom here, I'm one of the co-founders of Planepoints (we have a dedicated FT thread here).

Thank you for the kind words. We're working hard to add new airlines and have a public roadmap here where we're tracking feature requests and prioritisation.

Thanks for the feedback, and you’re right, we don’t currently show D or Z availability for Emirates as that data unfortunately isn’t returned by our GDS. We do show all other fare classes, along with Emirates reward seat availability.

As mentioned above, we have also got a public roadmap and are continuously improving the product based on community feedback, so really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. We want to make sure the product feels genuinely valuable and fairly priced for everyone.

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback and your open sharing of plans and progress. I'll monitor that thread and will probably try a month sometime.
I am not sure where your competitive advantage vs. EF would be. If you already need to charge $7.99 per month for less offering vs $9.99 for EF (and I completely understand that you need to charge), you'll need to pull out some extra features that people are prepared to switch for. But that's your business plan and I'm sure you would have thought about that.
Just one additional remark: If you cannot access D and Z buckets on EK, you can't really claim that you show awards, let alone upgrades. Yes, there are 'Flex Awards' in business class which come from 'O' bucket so technically you may be correct, but upgrades come from D (Business) or Z (First) and that's what most people would be interested in.
But I'll keep on following. Good luck!

Sorry for the slow follow up here. Just to clarify, we currently use two separate data sources for Emirates. Fare code and seat map data come via a GDS, while reward seat availability is sourced separately in a similar way to tools like Seats.aero and other reward search engines. These are surfaced in different views within the app (shown below).



At the moment we’re not specifically highlighting upgrade opportunities, although you can still see Flex vs Standard reward availability when viewing a flight in detail.

Really appreciate the feedback on pricing and overall value as well. To be transparent, our initial focus has been solving use cases for Oneworld travellers, particularly BA users, but we’re now actively expanding coverage and have a lot more planned on the roadmap