standby availability
 

I have a flight in the afternoon by would like to standby for one in the morning. When I called customer service they told me that there is atleast 9 seats left. Is there a way for me to check exactly how many seats are left?

You can go to jetblue.com and try to purchase the flight. During the process it will show you a seat map and ask you to choose a seat. That will show you how full the plane is.

No it won't. Seat maps are notoriously unreliable indicators of the number of available seats on a plane. There are frequently passengers with paid tickets and no seat assignments.

The GDS tools that all carriers use to indicate seats for sale are single-digit tools. So they max out at 9 (4 in some cases). You won't know how many more than 9 there are from those systems. And carriers are loathe to give out that data as they generally consider it secret/proprietary/whatever.

I agree that this is generally the case; however, JetBlue has a policy for Airports crewmembers to "prep" flights in advance. Part of this process is assigning seats to customers who have no assignment, so if this policy is being followed in that city, the seat map should be a pretty good indicator (aside from blocked seats, which will show as unavailable even if they are open).

In general, if at least 9 seats are unsold, it's my experience that revenue standbys will have no problem getting on. Rarely does a flight have that many revenue standbys, and since you'll be at the top, 9 open seats is definitely a good thing to hear.

Like caphis said, JetBlue seatmaps are generally more accurate than other carriers. Additionally, the method I suggested is really the only way the OP has of checking open seats short of calling the carrier (which he already did). If you have a more accurate way, you're welcome to share it.

But at what point does this happen? Probably not too far before departure. The OP was asking this morning about a flight for tomorrow morning. Would the flights be prepped that far in advance?

This has been my experience as well with just about every carrier I've done standby on, barring IRROPs messing things up.

More accurate but still not great, especially well in advance of the flight departure. As for a more accurate way, the only real option there is to be an insider. Otherwise you're stuck with the limited public data. I did not mean to imply that I had a better solution, only that reliance on seat maps is a very inexact art.

i thought about the seat map idea, but as mentioned I wouldn't expect a flight on Thursday to be preped today.

I haven't tried it yet, but the only other thing I can think of is booking 9 refundable tickets and checking again. That said, does JetBlue over sell their flights? If so knowing there are nine seats I can book doesn't do much good.

Their general policy is not to oversell flights.

Policy is to prep flights 5, 3, and 1 day out. Each flight is supposed to be prepped three times before the day-of.

A flight on Thursday should have been prepped Saturday, Monday, and again today (Wednesday).

JetBlue doesn't oversell, no.

I often fly jetBlue non-revenue and have never been bumped because of checking the status of flights before listing. The best site I know of for this is Flightstats.com under "Flight Availability".

As SBM12 indicated, jetBlue shows up with a maximum of 4 seats at anytime. When I really want to make a flight I try to use both JetBlue.com's seatmap and flightstats.com. If flightstats says no flights available, I don't even bother listing.

jetBlue is extremely nice to standby flyers and have always been extremely honest with me when I call to list. They'll tell me my chances and sometimes if I get a nice manager he/she just assign me a seat if the flight is empty (almost always an exit row seat).

I know this is a little off topic but if you are listing for Revenue/Non Revenue travel jetBlue lets you call up to a month (maybe more?) in advance to list.

In my opinion jetBlue is the best airline to fly non-revenue/interline on (no I don't work for jetBlue).