"Traveler" wrote in message
news:hk7vb.102832$jy.21434@clgrps13...
Thanks for the response. I'll stick to the SEA-SFO-SAN routing. Is there a
way to tell how full a given flight is earlier in the day to help
determine
standby chances?


If you have a tame TA, you can ask them to look at the flight and they can
tell you how full it seems to be: for example, a typical flight will have
1-3 booking classes for first classes and maybe 10-15 for economy, as
follows:

First (Business on intl): C D J
Economy: Y M B N X Q V .....

pretty much any letters can be used, it's the airline's choice. Y usually
means full-fare economy, with other letters representing cheaper fares. If
your ticket shows the tarriff, it will be something like YAPX14 (economy,
advance-purchase, 14 days) although the number of combinations are endless.

So, on a plane with say 150 seats in economy, you could have 50 seats free
but the TA's booking computer might say:

Y9 M9 B4 N2 X0 Q0 V0

which means that there are seats available at higher fares but no cheap
ones, assuming "V" is a cheap tarriff. On CRSes, "9" means "at least 9" -
it could be 50 or 100.

So, your TA can tell you how it's looking. Or, you could check the
website - go into the booking process but don't complete, and see if it
would sell you a seat or two, and at what price. Or just call them and ask
how full the flight is..