Seats.aero periodically retrieves available flights from the mileage programs we support and then displays them to you from our database. This means when you run a search on our Search tool or view flights in Explore, the data was retrieved from the airline in the past, not when you ran the search.
Sometimes, you may find the perfect flight on Seats.aero, only to visit the mileage program and be told it is no longer available! This isn't ideal and we try very hard to prevent it. Here are a few reasons this can happen:
The availability has been booked since we last checked. We display a "Last Seen" column on all of our results to help you identify when we last saw that flight as available. If it has been a while, it's likely that someone else saw the deal and booked it before you could.
You are searching for more than one available seat. All searches on Seats.aero are performed with the airline as one adult passenger. On some programs, we try to display if more than one seat appears available, but the airline may decide to charge a higher fare for two seats if they are available.
Some of the seats may have also been booked since we last checked, reducing the available seat count.
You are searching on a different mileage program than we checked. The mileage programs we support are part of various airline alliances, and they can book seats on their partner flights as well as their own. However, it may not always be the same availability across programs.
For example, Air Canada and Avianca can both book award flights for Singapore Airlines. However, Air Canada has significantly more access to Singapore award seats than Avianca does. If we show an award as available via Aeroplan, don't assume it can also be booked via Avianca.
The mileage program was displaying phantom availability. Sometimes, airlines will reply to our searches with flights that simply never had availability at all. Unfortunately, the airlines are the authority on what is available, and we cannot determine if they are providing phantom availability to us or not.
In all cases, it is very difficult for our systems to "imagine" any availability on its own. All of the results that we show you came straight from the mileage program.
How can you avoid these issues?
We suggest using our Search tool to help avoid availability that does not exist. When using our Search tool, any results older than three hours are refreshed with the airline in the background. This ensures you get the freshest data possible.
You can also click on the Information icon in the Explore page to refresh older results.