Point_Chaser

I have now experienced this a number of times, so I thought I'd ask all of you as well if you've seen this as well and what could be the cause.
Around midnight CET, for an hour or so, availability on most routes disappears in all deeply discounted booking classes (up to W/V). These are completely closed for an hour, only to open up again where available. I find it really odd, and I don't get it why this is? It makes it impossible to book tickets at that time as you really don't know the true availability...
Any ideas?

FlyingFinn

I don't know for sure, but one possibility could be that they recalculate the yields during midnight CET, i.e. a time when there's not that much booking activity happening (considering that the main market for tickets is Scandinavia and Europe in general). They would basically batch process huge amounts of booking data, compare this with the historical booking and no-show data to analyse the overbooking potential and then adjust the open fare classes (esp. the cheapo ones which close early if bookings for a particular flight are high) to keep the yields to the level wanted. During this process, it is of course beneficial to close the cheap classes but keep the more expensive ones open for any urgent bookings (with higher yield).

This is basically how Lufthansa does it, and their systems are actually quite sophisticated, resulting in far less bumps on LH flights than some others. There once was quite an interesting article about it on the LH inflight magazine.

Although running these kind of batches every night sounds a little weird.