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Am I the only one questioning the integrity of BA’s claim to guarantee 4 Club seats on every flight. Singapore hasn’t had a single seat in months so far as I can tell. Vancouver, Miami, Orlando all have loads of outbound, but not a single seat back. I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying it.
We could probably do a list of HfP readers who have the Singapore flights for most of the rest of the year.
If they weren’t getting released there would be loads of HfP readers posting each day that they called at midnight but couldn’t get the seats they wanted. It’s not happening though.
With the Americas, many people want a flat bed for the overnight but are less bothered about the day flight going out. This accounts for the disparity.
By the way, if you’ve got a new-style 241 voucher you’ll see a lot of extra availability in CW if you select it, and if you start in Manchester or Edinburgh there are HUGE amounts of additional availability for flights 3-6 months out.
Rob, thanks for your thoughts.
I was on there at the stroke of midnight last night/today, and not a single Club seat back from Orlando or Miami when I searched.
There are people with faster fingers.
During half term …. not surprising.
SeatSpy is showing J seats returning from MIA on Feb 15th and 16th right now! There is an issue with availability trackers atm, as discussed elsewhere, but there are often seats to be had when you actually go to book.
There are indeed people whose fingers are faster but it’s not other website users, it’s airline agents. And it’s not only that their fingers are faster but also because their tools are faster plus they have a processual advantage over a website user. Airline reservations systems are accessed by airline customer agents through special “terminals” and they use commands rather than a graphical interface. For example, in Amadeus, one of such airline reservation systems, a command to request seat availability for London-Singapore for 1st of March is AN01MARLHRSIN. An agent repeats entering this seat availability command on their screen shortly before the strike of midnight and as soon as availability is released (their command screen is refreshed much faster than the website), they then can reserve available seats using another quick command within milliseconds. Once an agent applied this command, those seats are held for the agent and they can proceed to actually do all the other necessary inputs (name, email, etc) without losing those seats. The trick is basically to get through to an agent before midnight but not too early because they can’t justify hanging on the line with you not doing anything for too long. I’ve booked Maldives, Cancun, and once got all 4 CW to Cape Town in high season this way. Good luck competing with the other callers 🙂
Put more simply ….
Online, irrespective of whether you think seats are in your basket, they are not really there. They are only pulled from inventory when you click ‘pay’.
By phone, they are instantly pulled from inventory and you can take all the time in the world spelling out passenger names etc.
I actually got our SIN tickets for this coming July at midnight but online: filled in
all the fields, including payment details, then refresh refresh at 2359h when it said “not yet
released for that date” – once they appeared, all reserved and paid for within about 20 seconds.I actually got our SIN tickets for this coming July at midnight but online: filled in
all the fields, including payment details, then refresh refresh at 2359h when it said “not yet
released for that date” – once they appeared, all reserved and paid for within about 20 seconds.How did you do that? I thought the process was to pick your flights and only then could you go through all the passenger details palaver?
I booked return flights from Cape Town in club for next Feb over the weekend. Was on the phone to the agent at midnight and she grabbed them straight away. I refreshed my screen at midnight too and the flights appeared but within less than 2 minutes after refreshing again they had gone. Although its clunky to have the best chance you have to be on the phone about 5 minutes before midnight so the agent can get everything set up, and then when the clock strikes midnight they can reserve them straight away and then go through the booking details afterwards.
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