My first post so please be gentle. My wife and I are flying to New York for Christmas, out of Brisbane and via LAX, on QF15 20 December. Is it possible to monitor the seat availability for this flight on a daily basis? Thank you for any help.

www.seatcounter.com is a good start! To show you a rough element of space.

Or www.checkmytrip.com - use your booking reference and then click on book details and a seat allocation may be put in which will show you the seat plan of the cabin

Or try to buy multiple seats on you flight to check availability. As 20 Dec is the Saturday before Xmas expect it will very full.

I have a flight on 19 Dec. (QF25 MEL-AKL that goes on to -LAX) A few weeks ago QF had 2 economy seats for sale. So very hopeful my upgrade request will be successful

Firstly, thank you for the very prompt replies. I have checked the Seat Counter site and found our flight just fine. However, can someone please explain what this all means?

Welcome to Flyer Talk Spudee

Each letter represents a booking class, and is sorted from highest to lowest alphabetically (some tools sort from highest to lowest booking class but not seatcounter). Each fare generally uses a particular booking class. Higher fares booking into higher booking classes than lower fares.

Each airline has it's own mapping of booking classes. Some common ones are F for full fare first class, A for discounted fare first class, J C D for business class, Y for full fare economy class, B H M V W etc for cheaper economy class fares.

Airlines make more seats available in the more expensive booking classes. They usually limit how many show in the display to either 9, 7 or 4. Don't add up the numbers to get the total number of available seats in a particular cabin - it doesn't work like that. 9 means there are at least 9. You can get an idea of how full a cabin is by how many seats are available in the cheap booking classes - lots = flight is not yet very full, none = flight may be close to full or totally full.

There are more intracacies for expert users (revenue/yield management is very complex) but this should hopefully be enough to get you started.

Thanks Kiwiflyer, I think I have it. Using your explanation I gather that there are not a lot of seats left on Q15 out of Brissie on 20/12. Thanks again.

Am i reading correctly then that my flight QF107 from Syd to LAX on 19 Dec is an economy class sell out but has plenty of business / first availability ?

If so am i more likely than normal to get an upgrade on points (i'm WP and only had a 1 in 3 hit rate so far) ?

If you lodged your UG request at 90 days prior, you should be near the top of the list. If you lodge it now, you'll still be ahead of "lesser" status people. Only CL will trump a WP (and perhaps staff travel (?) or staff relocation).

Right. Economy only has seats available in Y B and H - all rather high fares. Business isn't looking too bad though with plenty of seats available even in discounted booking classes. In this situation, economy might even be oversold (if necessary QF can op-up a few passengers into business class depending on how many no-shows there are).

Right. Y3 B3 and all other economy booking classes are zeroed, thus likely economy is already oversold. Plenty of availability in business class and first class.

Thanks once again Kiwi Flyer.

Note that this MAY have changed WRT time of request. There have been recent anecdotes that fare class within an elite level may have a greater weight in determining priority than time of lodging one's upgrade request.