GREAT site, full of information. Love it!
Anyway, trying to book a UAL round-trip flight IAD-TPA for travel 04/12/03. Searching UAL.com in expert mode for class code availability. The flight I want shows only 5 first class seats left. That would be great, but I am traveling with a wife, 2 children, and an infant in a car seat. Obviously, I want the S class economy fare (or any other discount fare) to save $$. I am looking 70 days in advance and they say the flight is booked!! I called UAL too and that's what they confirmed. I have trouble believing this. If I check the same flight for the day before or day after, it's the same story. Something is fishy. I started looking at flights 7 days from today, 14 days, 21 days, and inexcess of 30 days. Guess what?! Over 35 days or so and the flight is sold out, and under 35 days or so seats are available!! I even did the same experiment IAD-MCO and came up with similar results. Does UAL release buckets of seats at certain dates before the flight? Do they want other flights to fill up before releasing seats? I want this (or similar non-stop)specific flight, but refuse to pay through the nose for it. BWI offers only Southwest & AirTran non-stop. DCA is very expensive. Advice, please.

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

Great post. Can you please take this discussion to the United forum?

Thanks!

--richard, aka Mr. Moderator

This did not get moved to UA, so you should post there.

april 20,2003 is Easter. Easter is Mid term vacation. Mid term vacation is Florida. same story, re: HNL. Could also be a cruise boat, if cruise boats leave from that area.

UA typically does not assign 20 or 40% of the seats in the back of the plane. That shows up on the lack of seats on the seat map.

UA typically oversells economy by lots of seats if they can. (read the UA board) Maybe even 20%. That shows up as Y9 B5 M2 H0 Q0 V0 W0 S0 or some such. When all go to ZERO (Y in particular), that plane is full plus so much, they know they will never get another person on it.

I just checked going out on that 4/12 or Orbitz, and DL and US are $163 and 193 rt, with one stop. Sounds dirt cheap to me.

UA non stop on 1491 IAD-TPA is $326. There is a possibility they will not ticket.

If they show no seats in Y, then economy is almost certainly well oversold.

Is there a list of the codes and their meaning anywhere?

Try this. Cut and paste into your browser.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/014576.html

This is a great topic. It belongs in United forum. There are some great answers there that you can find using the Search function.

For technical reasons we can't move it so I am closing it. Please repost in the United forum!

Thanks for contributing!

--richard, moderator of TravelBuzz!