eRes Accuracy
 

Hey all, I’m curious what everyone’s experience is with eRes with respect to NRSA travel to Europe. This morning, flights we had planned on for tomorrow had plenty of seats available, even a dozen or more first class seats. As the day progressed, 9 first class seats disappeared as did every seat in the back and 5 first class seats became “held”. What was a sure thing quickly made us unsure if the information we have access to is reliable. When gathering information to try to make sense of it, I looked at misconnects from today’s flights, and the numbers didn’t add up.

Saw that happen once, trying to take the wife on a working trip. First Class wide-open until two hours before departure...then, 12 non-revs showed up that were more senior than Moses.

I’ve seen this happen about three times. To me it seems there may be a crowd of senior folk who look for open flights just to jump on...hitch-hiker’s guide to the universe via pass-travel.

Westbound, it can be a weight limitation...I’ve seen that a few times, despite lots of open seats.

It is possible that another carrier could have cancelled, and those pax are being put on our metal. Saw that the first days after the Max was grounded, with SWA pax.

eRes is pretty good overall, but there is always a random element when NRSA. And some markets are worse than others (Italy difficult; Germany usually not too bad).

Very common. Take a peek at regular fares. The day before and day of they often start dropping prices dramatically to just get some revenue in the seats, some come with upgrade possibilities, some are non-revs buying a seat on myUAdiscount as these fares are made available.

Pretty common. They dump the seats a couple of days before the flights. Not unusual at all.

A little update:

The flight went from -12 to 44 open a few hours before departure including 8 misconnects indicated on eRes. I saw a few trends and tried to apply logic to them just in case any of you are planning some long haul travel. It appeared that any oversell situation was mitigated by holding seats in another cabin, so it could be deduced that an oversell by 5 in coach would indicate -10 seats available on the flight as they’d “hold” 5 seats in first class taking them out of inventory.

My other observations are just guesses, so I’ll keep them to myself. Thanks for the replies.

Cheers.