I am flying from LHR to IAD on Thursday. This is the seat availability which is showing for my flight:

F9 C9 D9 Y9 B9 M9 H9 Q9 V9 W9 S9 T0 K9 L9

I'm a complete novice when it comes to reading this type of data. Could someone give me a bit of a primer on how to intepret these statistics? Interestingly, they're still offering cheap fares only 3 days in advance...is this unusual too?

Thanks,

David

You're in luck...the flight is WIDE open.

The display works as follows:

a. First is the letter for the class/sub-class (F if for First, Y for full economy, B, M etc lower types of economy depending on fare paid).

b. The letter is followed by the number of seats available, up to a maximum of 9. Anything lower than 9 means the flight/class/sub-class is filling up. A 0 means there are no more seats open for sale in the affected category.

c. In summary, the more 9's you see, the better the flight looks.

d. Having said this, sometimes flights are overbooked and they still show 9's. I guess it depends on how many no-shows they expect for the particular flight.

HOpe this helps....

Thanks very much.

The bizarre thing is that the UAL seat maps are showing very few seats open. I'm already booked on the flight - I'm just trying to calculate chances of an Op Upgrade.

Flights that are good candidates for operational upgrades will show lots of availability in the cabin you want to upgrade to and very little or no availability in the cabin to which you are assigned.

So if you're booked in economy, you'd want to see H0 Q0 V0 W0 S0 T0 K0 L0 -- which would mean that there were no restricted seats available and only refundable tickets for sale. That would tell me that the flight was overbooked, and that if they were selling more it would be at the highest fares (so they wouldn't mind bumping cheapies).

In that situation, if you see C9 D9, there would be plenty of business class availability and they would likely bump folks up from coach in order to get the most bodies on the plane.

See PremEx's Guide to Operational Upgrades (scroll down to the post by PremEx)

Remember that UA holds back certain % of seats for airport assignments.

Looking at the numbers you posted, looks like your chances of op upgrade is minimal. (What's your status?)

That's what I though - provided that there isn't some fault in UA's computer system - all the DC flights are showing wide open that day.

I'm *Gold (AC Elite) so relatively high up the list but not high enough - I have to say though that my track record for op upgrades with UA is far better than for AC.

You're not the first one which I've heard that from! Some of us SEs are saying that we've been treated better by UA than by AC.