V-Flyer

Hi all,

Does anyone know what time of the day seats are released for reward fares? Specifically G's? Having looked for a few days for a spare G to LAX I see a few more have been released around the date I want, so I want to be in a position to snap it up should something appear on a dummy booking! I imagine it would be around midnight?

Thanks in advance,

Oli

No specific time of the day, or day to be honest.

Just keep checking back every now and again - it is whenever the magical revenue management department earmark them for release. The fun of VS IT sometimes delays this release too, so not strictly a 9-5 rule either I am afraid.

Sorry absolutely no help there whatsoever.... anyone come up with the winning equation for reward fares?

Thanks Joeyc!

It's at least encouraging that some have been released in the last few days when there was none to begin with!

Do they tend to turn some fares into G's just because there are seats available or is it load/cancellation dependent?

olisones wrote:Do they tend to turn some fares into G's just because there are seats available or is it load/cancellation dependent?

It is load dependant. Basically if a flight is looking light as departure looms and they have full fare tickets available they will convert them to 'G' fares. If none are released give it a shot at the airport - they will usually make a call and if there is availability in the cabin then; miles exchanged, diff in taxes/surcharges paid and left you go

From VS perspective they are still getting something from the seats... miles and that fun little fuel and insurance surcharge of course ): Better than op upping people at the airport in case of oversell in ECO or PE.

Bonne Chance y)

joeyc wrote:anyone come up with the winning equation for reward fares?

I hear both Lord Lucan and Shergar cracked it...

pjh wrote:I hear both Lord Lucan and Shergar cracked it...

That is why they had to be "retired"...

I fear I have said too much 8D

We've been collecting the changes in reward seat availability for VS routes for several weeks now in the hope of determining some logic.

Here's the distribution of reward seat releases by hour of the day where 0 is midnight. Times are UTC/Zulu.



Interestingly, 50% of reward seats have been released between midnight and 6am. Previous posts seem correct that they can be released at any time though so far there are certain hours e.g. 1am-2am where we've seen no seats become available. I need to check if that's a symptom of our data collection though.

There is a fair bit of flip-flopping where a reward becomes available for a few hours, goes unavailable for a few hours, then comes back available again. I'm not sure whether reward seats are drip fed into the system or perhaps seats in other fare buckets being reserved and released is affecting reward availablity?

I'm planning to analyse the data properly when we have more.

RewardSeats

Wow -- that is interesting! Thank you for posting this.

I wonder if certain algorithms are run in the middle of the night UK time...

A couple of years ago I was hunting Gs to JNB. I was able to check randomly throughout the day but found that the best option for dates in the month I was seeking was between midnight and 6am. I nabbed the ones I wanted on separate dates at about 7am

I thought reward seats could only be booked by phoning up? Or having just looked you look online as normal and choose the spend miles option?

Is a reward sale emailed out or does it just appear on the site?

richardswife28 wrote:I thought reward seats could only be booked by phoning up? Or having just looked you look online as normal and choose the spend miles option?

Is a reward sale emailed out or does it just appear on the site?

Yep, book like any other online, using the spend miles option, you'll get an e-ticket like a normal one.

However unless something very straight forward, suggest ringing, I.e upgrading/ multiple legs/ etc..

The website is still very clunky...
NH

I can see RewardSeats going the way of Shergar if they continue down this line of thinking...

My, what a colourful pie chart

That pie-chart is just so interesting, thanks for posting, fascinating stuff.
Guess we can now expect a hell of a lot of v-flyers posting on this site between midnight and 6am then while we all await the required reward seat possibilities

It's *excellent* to see a rigorous, data-driven approach to the question of when G inventory becomes available! Thanks very much for sharing those data.

I'd love to see a plot of how many days before departure inventory becomes available, too...or perhaps a "total number of G seats available" plot over time, which would show both the release of new inventory and its consumption.

Question to RewardSeats: I take it you are screen-scraping the VS site to gather these measurements, correct? I was just considering writing my own screen-scraping tool to do just that. Any chance you'd share the code, or be willing to do queries on my behalf for a particular date and route I'm trying to upgrade on? Thanks very much!

-Brad

Really interesting! Thanks for all your responses. I shall be sure to keep checking during those G heavy times!

bnkarp wrote:Question to RewardSeats: I take it you are screen-scraping the VS site to gather these measurements, correct? I was just considering writing my own screen-scraping tool to do just that. Any chance you'd share the code, or be willing to do queries on my behalf for a particular date and route I'm trying to upgrade on? Thanks very much!

Yes thats correct.

I plan in the future to add a feature to http://www.rewardseats.com enabling you to get an e-mail when a seat you're interested in becomes available.

In the meantime, the code is a perl module so you'd need to be able to run and code around that. If you can do that, I'll check whether we could release the code.

RewardSeats wrote:I plan in the future to add a feature to http://www.rewardseats.com enabling you to get an e-mail when a seat you're interested in becomes available.

Now THAT would be an amazing option - until I discovered your site today I've been spending far too long running dummy bookings on the VS site!