Originally Posted by
sailingfun
I find the biggest source of confusion in non revenue travel is people ignoring the actual bookings and going to the seat availability page. If a flight with 160 seats is booked at 160 but shows 30 seats unassigned it's not a good bet. In the hours before the flight there will be 30HK's show up on the airport standby list and the flight will be full. The difference between booked seats and assigned seats becomes the dreaded HK's. There are a lot more booked seats without seat assignments in the last few years because the new cheap economy tickets do not allow advance seat selection. They are always HK's the day of the flight.
I get all that. I think there's also confusion about rev pax standing by for upgrades showing up on the list, as its not uncommon for there to be 50, 60+ revenue pax standing by for 2 first class seats.
In any case, the biggest PITA variable is fellow employees. Your vacation planned a year in advance can get smashed by sport listers popping up an hour before the flight. While seniority should obviously count, there should be some minimum cutoff, at least for international travel, where listing/check in carries at least some weight. To a lesser extent you see this domestically as well. DFW is a prime example, where its very common for dozens of employees to intentionally not list until shortly before the flight even though they planned on taking that flight for weeks.
There also needs to be a realistic and enforceable cutoff for S2 usage, like 24 hours prior or something. Senior employees shouldn't have unlimited ability to change their S3 to an S2 simply because someone else showed up as an S2.
Your best effort at planning things can also get sand in the gears from the people who like to list for numerous flights at the same time over multiple days. Lot of people do that, particularly for international, and that's just ridiculous. Its 2017 and the internet is everywhere; there is simply no need to do that and it makes it very hard to plan something that's already challenging to plan, for no real gain to those who do it beyond just being lazy.