BOOKMARK THIS: Free Airline Flight Availability Tool

by Gary Leff

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InsideFlyer.dk details a free online website that will show you what flights have seats for sale, and the availability in various fare buckets.

You can get this now with pay service Expertflyer but since FlightStats pulled its availability tool in 2014 most frequent flyers haven’t had a free way to search this information.

This is useful because some airlines do show award availability through public GDSs but mostly because you often want to find flights with seats available when your flight gets cancelled and you want to find other plans to suggest to an airline instead of just relying on them to figure out how to get you home.


American Airlines Customer Service, Phoenix

When FlightStats pulled down the option to see fare class availability from its website, I pointed out that BCD Travel’s Flight Availability website offered yes/no for availability in each class of service (first/business/economy) but not the number of seats or specific fare buckets or special classes.


American Airlines Mobile App Doesn’t Let You Rebook When Your Flight is Cancelled — But at O’Hare They Offer Telephones

However InsideFlyer.dk points out that the BCD availability tool now shows specific availability in each fare bucket. Huzzah!

You enter your search details:

Then you’ll get a list of flights, here are the first two that came up for Washington National to Chicago on January 31.

Click on availability for each flight and you’ll see detailed inventory for each published flight bucket:

Definitely bookmark the BCD availability tool.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. BCD doesn’t offer award availability, does it? Checking a DL flight that does have availability, BCD doesn’t show N. Or am I doing it wrong?

  2. The interface is clunky, at least on Safari. You cannot type the airport code “JFK” or “LHR” for instance. Thanks for the link but I will keep using Expert Flyer.

  4. I checked SQ availability and it does not show award class either. I am booked in O class, first, award, but it does not show that O even exists. I am trying to find business class award availability too and it does not show that. That is what I really want to see.

  6. Hmm, I searched a few Korean Air flights I’m eyeing, and BCD says there’s 9 seats in every single booking class. In some cases I don’t think there’s even 9 seats in the cabin (e.g. 777-200 has 8 first class seats).

    I wonder if this site just defaults to 9 seats when it gets confused… at least for Korean Air?

    Surely better than a hole in the head, but I think Expert Flyer remains the gold standard.

    Thanks for sharing!

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