Chucksta said:
... How do you know exactly how many businesss class seats are available?
I did a query and it gave me this:
J9 C9 D9 I9 U0 Y9 B9 H9 K9 M9 R9 L9 V9 S9 N9 Q9 O9 G0 T7 X7 E7
Do you just add up the numbers for J,C,I, and U? So does that mean 36 business class seats available? Or is it just 9 seats for all of business?
How about for economy?? ...
Those numbers won't tell you exactly how many business class seats are currently available, J9 D9 I9 U0 means there are at least 9 that Qantas are prepared to sell. It's the same for economy.
OK, there are at least 9 unsold seats in business class on this flight. There is quite possibly more than 9 available but Qantas only give GDS's (like ExpertFlyer) up to 9 for queries like this.
So, seats are available, but Qantas do not expect to sell many of them at Full rates and are prepared to discount all or most of them. They are not quite yet prepared to offer any (more) for Business class award redemption.
In this case there is a good chance of business class upgrade award seats appearing.
One more bit of information is required... how soon is this flight? If it's in the next few weeks the chances are better; if in a few months time more seats are likely to be sold and the chances diminish.
If expert flyer had returned something like J9 D1 it means Qantas are only currently prepared to sell one of these at a discounted business class rate. This indicates that the Qantas "Yield Management" voodoo expect to sell most of these seats, so they charge at full business class rates.
If Qantas are only prepared to sell 1 business class seat on this flight at a discounted rate it follows that there is unlikely to be any Award redemptions available in Business and very few upgrades (if any).
If it had been J2 D0 the implication is that few seats are now available and Qantas expect to sell them at Full rates. In these cases there is little chance of upgrade seats being available.
Givent that ecomomy awards are available (T7 X7) the implication is the flight is currently lightly booked.