I often when travelling, try to determine how many good my chances of getting bumped are, especially on the way back from a Biz trip. When I go into the advanced search at UAL site (as an example) and look at the various fares available, it shows Y9, F9, ect... Now, whenever I look at any flights, if I'm reading it right, everything is wide open. The way I think I'm supposed to read it, is that there are 9 seats available in Fare Class Y, and then you add that to all of the other numbers to get the total available seats. Is this correct? And if so, does anybody know of any flights that show only one or two seats available? On flight in particular I'm looking at is FL216 SEA-IAD on the 14th. It has thirteen "9"'s in front of various fare codes, so does that mean there is 13*9=117, 117 Available seats? Any help in lessnoning my confusion would be greatly appreciated.

The 9 simply means that at least 9 seats are available for sale in that fare class - there may be more, its a one digit field. Some reservation systems will show only 4 as a maxuimum available - that is for sale in one record. Sell those 4 or 9 and there are likely 4 or 9 more available.

When you see Y2 K0 V0 its saying 2 full fare Y available, no discounted K or V available.

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Have passport, will travel...
LAX, LHR, CDG, et.al.

Also, they are not additive. For instance, a NW flight might show P4 F2. In this case, there are 4 first class seats available for sale. 2 of those seats are available for upgrades. Similarly, a plane may show Y4 K2 V0, likely meaning there are four economy seats available, two of which are available in K class.

The number of seats for sale in an availability display means very little in terms of the total number of seats left to sell.

Imagine if you're looking in the freezer at McDonalds. They have 9 fish filets, 9 McRibs, 9 Burgers, and 9 chicken patties in there. You might think that they've got 36 sandwiches left to sell, but in reality they only have 9 buns left. The strange part is that the cashiers have sold 12 sandwiches. 2 of those people will be asked to wait a hour until more buns arrive, or maybe they'll be sent over to Burger King instead --they'll probably get extra fries for their trouble. 1 of them will be given super-sized McNugget meals instead, compliments of the manager.

[This message has been edited by SpuddBrother (edited 01-13-2002).]

Nah... 3 of the people that ordered sandwhiches will decide not to pick them up and McDs will have to through away an empty pair of buns.

Also, keep in mind that the number of seats which is shown as being available in various fare classes already accounts for however many seats the airline's fare management wants to overbook the flight by. The airline might have already sold as many tickets as there are seats on the flight, but still show nines across the board, if the airline's historical records and models predicts a lot of no-shows on this particular flight.

From my previous life, I looked at loads on flights all the time and this is how it was done with us:

Consider this a 737 with 12F and 116Y seats

CLASS SEATS AUTH BKED AVAIL
F 12 12 4 8
Y0 116 126 118 8
Y1 119 118 1
Y2 100 118 -18
Y3 85 118 -33
Y4 65 118 -53
Y5 65 118 -53
Y6 20 118 -98

For F, it is easy. It would read that there are 12 seats on the plane, yield managment will sell 12 seats in F (meaning they will not oversell), 4 seats are booked in F, and 8 are left.

For coach it was a little more difficuly. As you see there is a Y0-Y6. I don't recall exactly, but it was similar to this. Let's take DL's typical coach fares - Y,B,M,H,Q,K,L,U. Those are eight fares clases. Y0 would be Y, Y1 would be B, Y2 might be M and H, etc.... It means that different fares codes might pull out of the same bucket.

For the listing of Y0 (a typical Y fare), it is similar to F. You see there are 116 seats in Y, there are 126 Y0 seats authorized (the flight could eventually be oversold by 10), there are 118 total Y seats booked (flight already oversold by 2), and there are 8 more Y0 seats available for sale. For the listing of Y1 (a typical B fare), there are 119 seats authorized. This means of the total 126 authorized to be sold on the flight, no more than 119 can be booked in Y1 and lower. The last 7 (126-119) must be sold in Y0 inventory (typically Y fares). Wih the availability as shown, since 119 seats are authorized in Y1 and 118 are booked, there is 1 seat left to be sold in Y1 class.

For Y2, 100 seats are authorized at this fare or lower, 118 are already book, leaving the availability in Y2 and lower at -18, meaning these can't be sold anymore. This goes on and on down to Y6 which are the sale fares typically.

So in ITN expert mode, on UA.com, and on a TA screen for availability, you will see:
Y8 B1 M0 H0 Q0 K0 L0 U0

Now the above numbers aren't typical, just an example. Routes like ATL-MCO with 200 seats in coach might be authorized (from Y0 to Y6) 215, 210, 205, 200, 180, 150 - meaning they would sell 150 seats at the lowest fares - and oversell the plane by 15 - not many for a 200 seat coach section since families going to Florida will typically show up.

A "business" ORD-DCA flight with 150 seats in coach might be 190, 130, 100, 50, 20, 10. They are driving the yields up on this flight becasue they know the businessman will pay it. Also, they will oversell by 40 since many times business guys might be a no show.

Hope this helps.