General Airline Question

[BLLB]

We have booked flights for our upcoming trip. I check our flights to see if the times, or anything, have changed.

Frequently, sometimes more than once a day, our flight is listed as sold out, then shows that you can purchase seats.

I am curious if anyone knows how this might happen. It is not important, I just thought someone might know the answer.

 

[ccudmore]

A few reasons I can think of:
- Just because it's sold out, doesn't mean there's not seats available. The airlines often set seats aside for any passengers who may, closer to the date, need the seat as part of an international flight. For example, they don't want to give up all of the revenue from a Heathrow -> Ohare -> Desmoines flight just because the Ohare -> Desmoines segment was sold out. So those seats are set aside and may be released at the last minute.
- People have made reservations on the flight, and then changed their plans - either cancelling the flight or switching to another time
- Somone starts to book the flight and then doesn't complete the transation. When someone starts it holds the tickets for (for example) 10 minutes and then releases them if the transaction isn't complete. So the fact that you may be going in and trying to book more seats to see if there's anything available, may be triggering it.

There's probably many other causes - the airline industry load management groups are places of magic and wizardry.

 

[BLLB]

Thanks for replying.