Reply To: BAEC Silver – seat adjacent kept free?

[Londonsteve]

I flew to BUD yesterday evening and the middle seat in row 4 on a 319 was empty. As I predicted it was about 70% full. What was quite noticeable was that the rear third of the plane seemed to be packed in like sardines whereas the rows further forward had considerably more free seats. There’s clearly an algo at work obliging certain categories of passenger to be seated towards the rear of the cabin (no status? cheap fare buckets?).
Oddly once OLCI was open Expert Flyer was showing the middle seat as ‘occupied’ rather than ‘blocked’, I assumed someone was going to be sitting there but the agent confirmed during bag drop that wasn’t the case.