Is There A Way To See How Full Your Flight Is?

If you’re debating whether to spend your hard earnt cash or points on an upgrade you might be wondering if you can check how full your flight is. After all, if your sole purpose of an upgrade is for more personal space you might not want to upgrade if economy is pretty empty and you have an empty seat next to you or even better, having a whole row to yourself! Below are the best ways you can get an idea of how full your flight is…

See how full your flight is with Google Flights

Search for your trip on Google Flights but when asked how many passengers you are booking for select the maximum amount of 9. If the flight isn’t listed when you are looking to book 9 tickets it’s likely that the flight will be very full. You could also do this check on the website of whatever Airline you are flying with.

Check reward availability

Try booking tickets with your airline’s loyalty currency e.g. Avios for BA. If near departure there is a lot of reward availability it would suggest that the cabin is unlikely to be full. This is because Airlines (e.g. Virgin & BA) typically only release a set amount of rewards seats for each flight when flights are loaded. Typically these are taken long before departure (particularly on popular routes) so if there are the same amount of tickets available or more (e.g. they are trying to sell more points tickets as they can’t sell the cash ones) then the initial release it’s likely the flight won’t be full.

Use a tool…

You can use a tool such as Expert Flyer to give you a more detailed picture of the flight load. Whilst you can’t see exactly how full a flight is it does show you the availability in each fare ‘bucket’, up to nine seats. If your flight has 9 or close to 9 seats available in most fare buckets you can probably safely assume your flight won’t be full. In the majority of fare buckets are either sold out (showing 0) or have low numbers the opposite will be true

Can’t you check how full your flight is by looking at the Seat Map when reserving seats?

Unfortunately not. Lots of Airlines charge for seat assignments in advance so many passengers will either wait till they get free seat selection or have a seat assigned to them at check-in. These passengers won’t show on the seat map yet despite travelling on the flight. That’s why the seat map isn’t a reliable source of information as to how full a flight is.

Conclusion

As you can see there are a few different ways that you can get an idea of how full your flight is. Unfortunately, none of them are 100% reliable as to how full or empty your flight is but should give you a more informed picture as to whether you want to grab that upgrade or not! Do you have any tips on how to see how full your flight is? Let us know in the comments!