How to know a flight is not full?
Is it possible to know how many seats on a particular flight have been booked? If not, is it possible to know in which months of a year the flights usually are not fully booked?
Best Answer
There are two different things in aviation business:
Flight Availability
You can know if the flight has a seat for you to be booked. You can simply know this by visiting any flight booking site, for example: Kayak.com.
Seat Availability
This is to know how many seats are available in a given flight for each class, this information is usually available only from the airline's system and NOT from the GDS. I have an access to a system that shows seat availability for the airlines I work for (Amadeus Altea), it will show me detailed information such as this:
Not only that, it is accurate to the point I can see the overbooked seats!
If I use the same system to check other airline's seat availability, I won't be able to get the same full details as above, I will just get a general view of the classes and a simple availability where it will only shows 9 as the maximum number of available seats even if there are much more available seats, for reasons I do not really remember:
When doing the same search on Kayak.com, I got the same results showing 9 seats available:
Bottom line, you will not be able to know the exact number of available seats unless they are 9 or less available seats, and even that is not accurate as mentioned in Doc's comment, unless you have an access to the specific airline's system.
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Images: Maarten van den Heuvel, Rhys Abel, Gustavo Fring, JESHOOTS.com