kyleay

Hi All,
Does anyone know if there's a way to know if there are many / few seats remaining on a Southwest flight? If there is no longer a Wanna Get Away fare - is that the only indication the flight is filling up (and what's it take for that fare to disappear)?


Why? Background below if you're curious.
I have companion pass and have a flight booked for Nov 28th. I have a different companion I may want to travel with before that trip and don't want to change to the other companion until after that trip...

Also, it's an international flight with $110 in taxes, so just booking a flight with points / refunding later (when adding companion) would result in unused funds for later for my companion, so not a great option. Thanks,
--Kyle

zachary

My method is to run a search after changing the number of passengers to nine. If I can buy nine seats, I figure it's not yet close to selling out.

Because WN no longer overbooks, if nine passengers shows sold out, you can lower the number until it shows that you could buy the tickets. That would theoretically tell you how many seats are left. But, of course, that's only theoretical. So when I see fewer than nine seats available, I add my companion.

kyleay

Great idea, thanks for sharing!
--Kyle

sdsearch

ExpertFlyer (a paid service) can tell you at a glance for all flights on a given route a day (or even several days at a time), whether there's 8 or fewer seats left for sale. It's in a format like this:
where 8 is maximum number they can show, and C is subsituted for the number when a particular fare bucket is Closed.

So if you just want to check one particular flight, the trick mentioned above of trying to reserve more seats can work OK, but if you want to check a lot of flights or if you want to keep re-checking the same flights over and over and over*, ExpertFlyer (or some other service which access the data that's provided to travel agents) is going to be a lot easier.

* ExpertFlyer lets you save an availability search (origin city, destination city, date[s], time[s], airline[s], connection[s]) and repeat it at any time.

mek17

If you search and select a fare on the Southwest app, it will tell you if there are just a few seats left at a given price. This does not necessarily tell you how many seats are left on the plane, but it is still helpful information that is not provided on the website (that I know of).

kyleay

Thanks! All very helpful!
--Kyle

rsteinmetz70112

Not sure how helpful this is. My A+ wife tried to go stamdby, called and was told there were more than 8 seats. When she got yo the airport she was told the flight was sold out. She eventually got tbe last seat on the plane.

sdsearch

Nothing is guaranteed. There could be more than 8 seats left (actually just 9 seats left, but you don't know that much), and then a group of 9 people could book 9 seats at once (or 4 + 5 in close time proximity), and poof, it could be all gone in that instant. While that doesn't happen every day, it can happen sometimes.

But that's true no matter what the number. A giant sports team could reserve a good chunk of a plane, so even if you were able to see if there were 20+ seats available, that still wouldn't be a guarantee.

The only way to "guarantee" is to book right then and there if there are any seats available at that moment.