Is there a way to tell if SWA flights are full?

[disynut]

I'm just curious if our flights tomorrow and next Friday are totally full. I'm betting they are, but I'm just curious. I know I could check the website to see if there are still tickets available to buy, but I believe they overbook, so I don't think that would be very accurate. I know on other airlines you used to could see what seats were still available, etc.

 

[safetymom]

Call the airline and ask how full the flight is. Say you were thinking of flying standby and wanted to know how full it was. You don't need to tell them you already have tickets for that flight.

 

[Deb & Bill]

I was watching Airline on A&E the other night (that show about Southwest and their customers). On the last show I watched, they were trying to get something like 5-10 customers to give up their tickets for vouchers and tickets on the next flight. They didn't have any takers, if I recall. The Southwest flight staff said that they usually overbook by about 20%.

 

[CarolA]

Call the airline and ask how full the flight is. Say you were thinking of flying standby and wanted to know how full it was. You don't need to tell them you already have tickets for that flight.

This genearally does NOT work with SW. They don't do standby so they don't do well when you ask about standby. Sometimes they will tell you if there are seats however.


Also, always remember that Airline is a TV show... I used to fly SW ALL the time and can tell you that my personal experience was that they overbook LOTS less then most airlines I fly. I never even got an opportuntity to bump... SO on Airline you don't see the 10 flights that just left that had empty seats... you only see the ONE oversold....

 

[NotUrsula]

I agree w/ CarolA, SWA does not generally overbook as much as most traditional airlines do.

Another thing to remember about SWA is that, because most of their flights are milk runs, they can almost never afford to hold a flight for late-arriving connecting passengers. Almost all of the "oversold" flight scenarios one sees on Airline are filmed at Midway, where SWA has a lot of connecting passengers. If their flight in was late (usually due to weather), they missed their flight out, so SWA has to find them a seat on another flight. (They can *very* creative with the routing in these situations.)