Class Availability Mystery

[JohnK]

It's now sitting at W5 T4 on 23 Dec BKK-SYD, so must have had a cancellation.

The WT+ cabin had 3-4 empty seats, maybe more, BKK-SYD on 23 December. The whole flight was light in all cabins so not sure if upgrades caused these changes. In fact after the meal service the person in 11K disappeared for the remainder of the flight. She must have snuck her way into business class somewhere. The FAs were a little surprised when after serving breakfast the breakfast pack on 11K was still there.

I still can't understand why I had difficulty booking a discount WT+ airfare 5 weeks before the flight. Maybe people do hold on to bookings for more than one flight and closer to departure decide on which booking to keep.

 

[GDSman]

The WT+ cabin had 3-4 empty seats, maybe more, BKK-SYD on 23 December. The whole flight was light in all cabins so not sure if upgrades caused these changes. In fact after the meal service the person in 11K disappeared for the remainder of the flight. She must have snuck her way into business class somewhere. The FAs were a little surprised when after serving breakfast the breakfast pack on 11K was still there.

I still can't understand why I had difficulty booking a discount WT+ airfare 5 weeks before the flight. Maybe people do hold on to bookings for more than one flight and closer to departure decide on which booking to keep.

Happy New Year to All
BA is extremely active in its yield management activities - probably the most visible in terms of its constant juggling to maximise revenue. However GDS software is available to perform name matching for dupes on same and alternate flights meaning that the airlines will auto-cancel any booking where they identify the same passenger appearing multiple times. Not all carriers use this to its fullest but BA does at least a bit. I would guess that the changes come from a combination of the YM tools kicking in on a given schedule, natural booking and cancelling patterns and the time of year which is a pretty fickle one.

 

[straitman]

Happy New Year to All
BA is extremely active in its yield management activities - probably the most visible in terms of its constant juggling to maximise revenue. However GDS software is available to perform name matching for dupes on same and alternate flights meaning that the airlines will auto-cancel any booking where they identify the same passenger appearing multiple times. Not all carriers use this to its fullest but BA does at least a bit. I would guess that the changes come from a combination of the YM tools kicking in on a given schedule, natural booking and cancelling patterns and the time of year which is a pretty fickle one.

It would be interesting to see how this works for really high frequency flyers such as Kiwi Flyer :!:

 

[Evan]

It would be interesting to see how this works for really high frequency flyers such as Kiwi Flyer :!:

Should be ok as it only will kill wait lists, not confirmed books generally, also i would imagine there is some smarts that would check a customers history, or atleast refer it to a human for processing.

But BA have a number of times for me not tickted my booking before i get to the airport ! resulting in some interesting converstations at check in. They seem to have a different way of running things sometimes.
E

 

[GDSman]

A big consideration is booking source - book on the airline's website, where most require you to pay in full immediately, and they feel pretty secure about things; go through an agent and they want to be sure the software is identifying dupes. Airlines like BA are very sensitive to paying GDS fees for unavailed bookings and having fake bookings on aircraft during the peak purchase period for a given flight

 

[Evan]

So the airlines pay the GDS fee if the agent makes a whole lot of waitlist requests or bookings without payment ? i guess it makes sense but i see thats a good reason why they dont want dupes.

Why do the airlines even allow agents to keep bookings for more than a few days ?

E