At 17:47 07/27/03 Douglas Schnell offered the following:
>Question for the yield management gurus.... (since I can think of nobody
>else who would push these policies).
>
>Every flight I've been on in the past year or so seems to have most of
>the
>seats "locked" by the airline until about two hours before
>departure. That
>is, airline seat selection programs (including the airline's own
>self-checkin kiosks) show all but a few seats as occupied or otherwise
>unavailable. When you ask an agent, the answer is always "oh, those
>seats
>haven't been released."
>
>Real world example: checked into SNA today for a PHX flight. In PHX, I
>connected to BOS. When I bought the ticket last week (at
>americawest.com)
>and when I used the self-service kiosk this morning, only middle seats
>were
>available. The woman next to me was also traveling to BOS from SNA
>and the
>agent told her "they haven't released the seats on the Boston flight yet.
>Check with an agent Phoenix to see if something else is available." All
>well and good, but by the time I got to PHX, the BOS flight was a few
>minutes from boarding. The flight had already checked in full, so I
>was in
>the middle for the 5 hours to Boston.
>
>Any particular reason or strategy behind locking the seats? I'm at a
>loss
>to find a justification.
The seats that were not available (to you at checkin) were probably
preassigned to other passengers who had done that by phone when making
their reservations. (I don't know if HP does preassigns but most of the
majors do.) Anyway, they would not be "released" to other passengers
until a certain time before departure (usually between 20-30 minutes,
sometimes 10 depending on the particular carrier's published time
limits). The seats that would be released would only be those that were
noshow passengers. Unfortunately, if you are a connection passenger,
potentially you would not be there to pick up a seat that would have
been released while you were in the air. Hope this explains things a
little--it doesn't help your middle seat situation though.
************************
Bill Tinsley
Time is a great teacher,
but it kills all its pupils.
*************************