Web based "Seat Counter"

[Kip Powick]

Here is a handy little gadget.. I don't vouch for it's accuracy but perhaps some of you can cross reference it with your own sources...

How many seats?

[Fido]

Seat counter is good if you want to find out what fare class is still for sale. If you are buying a ticket and want a special "A" class fare then one an test out to see what routing to take.

It does not tell you much more about how many seats are sold or remain to be sold.

[Kip Powick]

I don't use it cause I can use the Employee travel, (for AC), which is "fairly accurate...but couldn't you just add the numbers up and subtract that from the number of seats on the aircraft and come up with the number of seats available ??

If there are only 3As and 6Hs available wouldn't that tell you there are only 9 seats available on the plane or am I reading it all wrong?

Personally I wouldn't think it is that accurate...but then again in the airline industry...what is??

[Fido]

Not even close. All of the fares offered in the economy cabin are a subset of Y. All of the fares offered in the executive cabin are a subset of J.

If the economy cabin looked like:

Y9 M9 U7 B7 V4 Q0 K0 ......etc

Then there are at least 9 seats available for sale. The systems do not tell you anything higher than 9, so there might be 100. On the other hand the flight might be oversold already but the airline figures on a high no show rate. Some airlines and reservations systems will only allow a maximum of 4 seats to show as available.

The seat counter display is alphabetical so one needs to know the hierarchy of each individual airline to know which letter supersedes which other letters. The example I gave above is typical for Air Canada but not for any other airline.