Flight Availability - App and web shows zero availability for many days
 

Apologies for the long description.

There was no availability shown for days on end for economy and premium economy direct LAX - NYC flights for example between 6/4 and 6/17 (as of two days ago) even though 8 direct flights a day... there was maybe one flight showing availability in economy at > $1,000 one way.

I called the GS line and asked the rep to look to see if their view was different, and they confirmed no, there was zero availability. For 13 days x 8 flights a day for their to be no availability simply made no sense. I asked them to look into a couple of individual flights to see if there were names there, or whether the seats were simply blocked, They said names were there and it must be groups.

Literally 24 hours later, I am checking again... WIDE OPEN!! Fares in the $1XX range also.. so clearly something was up.

Tried NYC to LAX on 6/6 - a few minutes ago, wide open, Now, Limited availability and expensive. (6/6 - 6 of the direct flights from EWR no availability). What is going on? (It can't be clear your cookies, do private browsing, otherwise the reps would see the availability.)

The above two time are not the only times.. previously I have put it down to my incompetence, but I'm leaning out of that scenario right now...

It’s a combination of two things:

(a) Revenue Management is intentionally a black box. Airlines work hard to make sure that their fares are as unpredictable as possible. We will never know all of the inputs that they use to figure out where to set inventory levels.
(b) It’s the weekend. UA does most of its schedule management on the weekends, and that can mess with inventory as they make changes.

Note that the correlation you’re looking for, between the number of tickets they’ve sold and the price, doesn’t exist. (See: point (a) above). It’s entirely possible for a flight to be empty and for RM to think that discount inventory should be zeroed out, because they think that they can sell those seats for more money if they wait.

As schedule and equipment changes are being made it is not unusual for inventory to blocked but this is usually for a fairly short period of time

But for 6 June , presently see lots of availability
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...65542d8e4b.png

I've been seeing variants of this more frequently across airlines the last month or so. There's been so much flux both in flight schedules and fares (increasing rapidly), the carriers are constantly tinkering with inventory and pricing, and all sorts of weirdness results. As jsloan notes, you're especially likely to see this stuff on the weekends, when the carriers are updating their schedules.

What irks me a little is that this never made sense to me in the first place.. zero availability on so many direct flights.... yet the agent didn't have a similar level of skepticism.. something clearly was up and I had to wait a couple of days for it to clear itself up.

I have a similar issue for a couple of weeks time, though the flights are showing available at high fares... time to wait and then book or not. :-)