Seating Chart vs Seats Sold
 

For each flight United shows a seating chart that shows the assigned seats.

Is there any way to tell how many seats are actually sold for each flight? I know in the past there was a 3rd party that used to show the seat inventory for each flight.

Expert flier is your best bet; it is a paid subscription though.

The seatmap and actual seats sold actually have no bearing on each other.

Or KVS. Seating chart is not about avail of seats.

While we have the tips tricks and guesses (fare buckets, seat maps, expert flyer, etc.).... The actual numbers are something that UA keeps pretty quiet.

The seat bucket counts are the best you can do -- they tell if you there are more or less than 9 seats still to sell at each available fare bucket ... when Y is under 9, you know the flight is damn near full. AS more buckets hit zero on any given flight, you are getting closer and closer to a fully sold plane. That being said, it's not perfect as the airline sometimes blocks some seats which it will later unblock -- but it does give you a sense.

Thanks. I will sign up for the 5 day trial, but I don't think the give me anymore information than is on the United site.

Who is KVS?

I am not looking for the actual numbers. I am trying to determine if a flight is overbooked. Since the merger, it seems more flights are overbooked, and there are more opportunities for a voluntary bump.

Please see http://Help.KVSTool.com/#Q38

Unfortunately not.

Correct, and also the amount of available seats on a seat map does not mean there are exactly that amount of tickets still available for sale in the cabin.

Great advice FlyingProf!

As others have mentioned no way to public access the number of sold seats.

You can access the info on fare class availability (the info that seatcounter displayed) from a number of free sources, such as united.com or flightstats.com. EF & KVS have this info also (but for a fee).
Award space & upgrade inventory is available on united.com (for free) or on F & KVS for a fee.

again this is not directly available and oversold status is very dynamic and can change quickly. Even hard to reliably predict from seats maps or fare class inventory -- many have attempted and been unsuccessful

Is the flightstats.com seat availability tool still working? I get very limited results from it on multiple searches...typically nothing found.

I realize seat maps and actual inventory can vary widely, but one upcoming flight I'm monitoring (UA 6272, IAD-AUS, 3/1/13) looks awfully strange. The CR7 seat map shows 24 seats unassigned in Y, yet EF shows zero Y inventory (Y0, B0, etc.).

How can a fully-booked flight that departs in 2.5 days have nearly 40% of its seats unassigned? Normally, I'd assume an aircraft change had just occurred, but I've been monitoring this flight for over a week and neither the seating chart, equipment type, nor the Y inventory has changed by more than a couple of seats.

Waiting for suckers with no E+ access to buy up E+ seats before giving them away for free is my guess....

This does not seem unusual to me. Not everyone goes online to get seats assigned and many wait to do this at check-in at the airport, where they can be surprised to find that only middle seats are available. I predict that at T-24 a great deal more seats will be assigned.