snaxmuppet

I am on BA295 LHR - ORD on 26th Nov. The WTP cabin has just one seat unallocated and 4 seats blocked (first row in cabin). yet EF shows the availability as
I know about over-selling classes but this seems a little OTT to me... W9 E9 T9 suggests a low load yet the cabin is already nearly full. What is likely to happen in this scenario?

craigthemif

The key is I9.... Loads of space in Business Class to op-up into.

So you keep selling PE seats. Otherwise people are more likely to buy Economy than Business when faced with a sold-out PE, costing you revenue...

BertieBadger

They move extra people from WTP into available CW seats - isn't it just that simple?

(W9 E9 T9 doesn't necessarily suggest a low load in that cabin as I understand)

Tobias-UK

Upgrades ^

A P Yu

Its not unusual to see WT+ to be 20 seats overbooked on flights where Club has lots of space left.

flatlander

That's for a USA point of sale. For the UK POS, where most people are likely to originate from, it's
but it's still a bit odd to be selling the cheapest fare bucket with so few seats left in the cabin.

Should BA sell a lot of those WT+ seats I expect they will simply upgrade some passengers to Club.

Foofighter69

This year I flew LHR-YVR (Vancouver) on an A380 with 60+ oversold in WTP, with 97 seats in CW you can imagine how empty that super jumbo was up front!! The crew showed me a little sheet which showed how many upgrades there were, and then the iPad seat map confirmed it. Interestingly they managed to convert a few WT/WTP passengers into CW with AUP. I was offered it and politely declined only for my seat to change on the app while in the lounge.

I was allowed to buy an Avios ticket with literally every seat occupied. They were also selling 9+ T buckets. This was just 3-4 days out.

The same happened to me on the return.

Happy days!

snaxmuppet

flatlander Yes, you are correct... I hadn't changed my POS default in EF!!! Sorry!

Still looks a bit weird though.

I am asking the question in an effort to try to understand a little better how BA ticket availability works. I still haven't got my head around what the availability as reported in EF actually might mean to flight loading. Clearly there is no direct link from availability in EF and actual seat availability. AIUI the W9 in the EF availability simply means that BA are willing to sell 9+ W tickets... it has no direct bearing on how full the W cabin will actually be. It is all a bit of smoke and mirrors!

BertieBadger

As c-w-s frequently points out, when looking at availability either from the perspective of loading or reading the runes to divine the will of the op-up gods, you have to take something of a "whole plane" view.

In the case of the F cabin, the correlation will be much more direct simply because there is nowhere for oversold F passengers to move forward to, leaving unwelcome downgrades as a last - and it seems fairly infrequent - resort. But with the other cabins, if there is space available somewhere on the aircraft that the passenger can be upgraded to then why not sell them that ticket? The alternative (as pointed out before) is to miss out on potential revenue.

Would it be helpful to reverse the question and ask you what you think the availability should be? Take the big bus - a BA A380 has 55 WTP seats. Once they have sold 55 tickets across the W/E/T classes how many more should they offer for sale? How do you come to your number?

flatlander

It's the T and E availability that surprise me. W availability doesn't surprise me that much since a close-in W class ticket in WT+ is so expensive it can be more than a cheap Club seat further out!

If you bought a W selling class ticket for that flight you're basically paying half or more the price of discount Club for a reasonable chance of a Club seat. A gambling person might take that.

Of course, much as companies used to deny F even if Club was more expensive, these days companies many deny Club for business travel but allow WT+ even at high cost. BA may be trying to capture more of those people rather than closing off WT+ entirely, even if in practice they are guaranteed to need to upgrade some people if they sell another seat at this stage.

snaxmuppet

That is not a question I can really answer and it would even be unrealistic for me to even have a view on it. There are many factors aren't there. I have no issue with over-selling a particular cabin it there is the ability to OPup some into higher cabins if BA consider that commercially acceptable. The issue I potentially have is with over-selling the entire plane if it means that some will be IDBed.

Does being Gold pretty much remove any chances of being IDBed?

BertieBadger

Well the point I was clumsily trying to make is that without the data that BA have, it's not really possible to say how many more seats they should sell in that cabin. As you point out there are a number of factors at play that mean the cabin could well be full but the plane in its entirety is not - So (F excepted to some degree) you can't reliably extrapolate cabin loadings from availability data beyond the broadest brush view.

Now, if the whole plane is F0 J0 W0 Y0 you can reasonably conclude it's full.

Ah, now that is somewhat different question! This comes back to the "whole plane" view I was talking about earlier, and while I'm no expert that is ultimately one of the goals of Revenue Management, to sell as many seats as possible, for the highest profit possible and get as close to an IDB scenario without actually needing it. From my very-much-layman perspective,it seems they are quite good at it and it all seems to (mostly) come out in the wash.

Does being Gold prevent IDB? Again, no expert but I would say no, it does not prevent it. It will certainly help your cause all else being equal, but if a Goldie is the very last person to check in on an oversold flight, I believe they will still be IDB-ed

From what I understand, the best things you can do to is check in early, and allocate a seat (which Gold can obviously do early on). But I'd defer to wiser heads on that one.

sammyg901

Quite common on HI-J routes to the USA, Dubai etc in my experience - WT+ is a hugely popular cabin, lots of corporate policies only allow this class of travel, especially on a day flight. So BA seem to prefer to have the J seats available for when demand is high but otherwise sell them WT+ seats and upgrade

I often think this is where a separate upgrade bucket might be useful for Avios, they could then get something in return for moving passengers forward, without new redemption bookings on the flight.

On some airlines in this scenario you'd quite often see the seats being used for the lower class - e.g. Cathay Dragon on HKG-KUL the rear business cabin is often sold as economy. So it's nice that BA upgrades with the full service

flatlander

The general experience on this forum, and my personal experience, is that BA very rarely involuntarily denies boarding due to overbooking (i.e. excluding aircraft breakdown, weather delays, crew sickness, etc). On a whole-aircraft level they are good at managing their loads, and even voluntarily denied boarding is rare. IDB is very rare. Check in on time, show up on time, and you will very, very likely get on the aircraft when it leaves.

corporate-wage-slave

In short, BA knows what they are doing (most of the time). We the passengers don't know what they are doing (any of the time) but ultimately IDB is rare, IDB to status passengers rarer still but usually RevMgr is smiling most.