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I have had airlines do a weird form of this all the time. Particularly Delta, IIRC. "Only 2 seats left at this price." Which is already bad, since what are the

I have had airlines do a weird form of this all the time. Particularly Delta, IIRC. "Only 2 seats left at this price." Which is already bad, since what are the chance that those aren't two middle seats half a plane apart? But then you click in to purchase, and there will be zero seats at the listed price. I don't know what the point was — there was never going to be a sale, because the offered price never really existed, and it only ever serves to reinforce that I should have just taken the offer from SWA in the first place, because they continue to be the airline that screws with me the least…

toast0 5y ago
So there's a couple things going on there. When there's actually only 2 seats left at that fare, it's not usually the case that those are referring to specific seats; the fare gets you any available seat in some section, but only a limited number are available at the nice prices (and inventory management systems adjust pricing over time); also, not all bookings get a seat assigned, so even if the section will be 100% booked with your purchase, you may have choices in seats, and you can often (but not always) call and talk to someone who can finagle something together. The other thing is while I think some of the only 2 left is probably intentionally misleading, some of it related to cached data. Airline inventory systems tend to be expensive to query, so it's tempting to show data from a cache if possible, but then there's freshness issues that you noted. Or there's just other people shopping too.