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When I was AirNZ GE I would often use the GE upgrades (220 APD = great value).
Because they were generally only confirmed just before takeoff, it was good to be able to check how busy a flight is and thus have an idea of the likelihood of getting the upgrade.
The way I would do this is:
(1) Login to expertflyer.com (using my free account = 4 searches per day)
(2) Create a seat alert for the flight I wanted to check, first checking the Premium Economy section. That way you’d get a feel for how many seats were free.
(3) I would then click “Refine search” (fastest way to just change 1 parameter of the search) and then choose to view the Business Class section.
Reason for checking Business Class is that it’s highly likely that people in PE have also put in for upgrades and thus if there are plenty of spare seats in Business, you can find you still get an upgrade to what initially appears to be a full PE section!NH
The only problem with that if you’re only seeing the number of unallocated seats, not necessarily the number that are unsold. Lots of people flying in both PE and BP don’t bother to select seats.
You can simply create a dummy booking on the Air NZ site and see unallocated seats as well. You can also try booking different numbers of seats (up to 9) to get an idea of how many seats Air NZ are willing to sell on that flight, remembering of course that they may be willing to oversell 1-2 seats.
The only problem with that if you’re only seeing the number of unallocated seats, not necessarily the number that are unsold. Lots of people flying in both PE and BP don’t bother to select seats. You can simply create a dummy booking on the Air NZ site and see unallocated seats as well. You can also try booking different numbers of seats (up to 9) to get an idea of how many seats Air NZ are willing to sell on that flight, remembering of course that they may be willing to oversell 1-2 seats.
But expert flyer would show remaining unsold seats in the different fare buckets rather than say the NZ site that shows people who have bought AND selected seats which ignores those seats sold but not selected.
I signed up to EF for a year but haven’t played around with it as much as I wanted to but have been happy eye balling NZ’s seat maps as a gauge. If I’m keen for an upgrade then I just submit and nowadays am happy to wait and see what happens – no angst about whether it comes through. What will be will be and is out of my control regardless of tools like seat maps and EF although it can be a bit of fun to guess at likely outcome.
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