Let me see a trial with live data now!

What is the source of the availability data?
The standby availability checker application uses publicly available airline availability displays provided by one of the major GDS systems

Yes, but what about overbooking profiles?
We fully understand that availability displays are manipulated by those clever chaps in revenue management, and we take this into account with our secret formula (see below)

What about the cabin capacity figure?
This shows a 'typical' configuration for the specified aircraft flown by that airline. In cases where the airline operates several versions of the same aircraft type you may find your plane is slightly different. In the interest of being conservative we tend to show the configuration with the smallest economy cabin.

What is the difference between 'premium' and 'economy' capacity?
Different airlines apply different marketing brand names to their cabins. For example the most luxurious may be designated 'First', 'First/Business', 'Executive' etc. And aircraft can vary from single cabin up to four or even five cabin configuration. For this reason, we designate the rear cabin only as 'economy', and all cabins above this as 'premium'. (The exception is British Airways where World Traveller and World Traveller Plus are both designated as 'economy')

Why should I care about 'economy' capacity?
First of all, the bigger the aircraft the better your chances.Statistically the chances of 2 no-shows in a 200 seat cabin is far greater than 2 no-shows on a small regional jet. Also, many airlines will only load employee nonrev passengers in their economy cabin leaving staff behind if economy is full, even when there are premium seats available. Others will make the effort to ensure no one is left behind, even if an ID90 passenger gets loaded into First Class. We have chosen to be conservative and only show the economy cabin situation, as a 'worst case'

Why should I hide codeshare flights?
Code shares are when one airline ('the marketing carrier')sticks its flight number on the aircraft of another airline (the 'operating carrier'). There are several different ways in which the marketing carrier may be supplied with inventory availability from the operating carrier. It is best to ignore marketing carriers, designated by ('c') in our displays. You can do this with the 'hide/show codeshares' button. The most accurate availability will be that displayed by the operating carrier

All very interesting, but how does the forecast actually work?
Our forecasts are based on a proprietary software algorithm which uses the expert experience and knowledge of iddeals. We take into account a number of variables derived from the availability display and the aircraft cabin size to determine our predicitions. In other words 'it is a secret!'

When the display shows 9 or less it will be very accurate. And certainly a display of '0' means absolutely that no more seats are being offered for sale. Figures between 9-49 will be based on our algorithm and tests show that the confidence limits for accuracy are +-10% in 80% of cases. A figure of 50+ means the flight is still wide open for sale.

What about AA?
American Airlines chooses not to distribute its availability through the source system we are using.