Passenger load factor?
 

I don't know if this belongs in this sectioin but ...

could someone tell me how to find what the true load factors of a particular flight are? The seat map on the airline page is nowhere near what the actual numbers are. Do outside people have access to the information that airline employees have when they want to deadhead or non-rev?

Thanks for any response

bill

Call the airline and ask. Most of the time they will tell you. If one agent doesn't, hang up and call again.

That information is generally not public. The airline will tell you if the flight is overbooked (they are supposed to, anyways) but otherwise do not expect to ever really know, at least not with publicly accessible data sources.

In the UK the CAA publishes on their website the actual number of passengers on each city pair per month, so from the timetable you can work it out. Is similar available in the US ?

Yes. Here it is bts.gov that releases the stats. But the numbers don't really translate into loads since there are multiple carriers on most routes. Plus there are both connections and non-stop flights on the BTS numbers.

There really isn't a way to figure out the LFs for a particular carrier/route here that I have figured out.

perhaps you can check how many seats they are willing to sell at perhaps T-3hrs if you are doing for a long term analysis.(like the Y class inventory at T-3)

but if it's for "curiosity" it's a bit hard or it's too much work.

I don't do it too often, but I have never had an occasion where I couldn't get an agent to give me a rough idea of the load factor.

Often you can check by booking flights last minute. (or not booking them, but checking availability). If the price is high, there is low availability. If cheap, they have seats to shift. Also, you can try booking multiple seats, sometimes there are 2 seats, but not 3, or whatever.

I think amadeus.net used to show the number of seats available? But now they've turned into a kayak skin.