Scoring an entire row to oneself is about the best fortune that someone traveling in economy can have.
For two people flying together, there is also the longstanding “middle seat trick” of booking the aisle and window seat in the hopes that travelers will not choose the middle space. While many swear by this as a clever travel hack, its success will only work if the flight is underbooked.
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An unidentified airplane is seen flying above the clouds at sunset. Department of Transportation data reveals which routes have the highest number of empty seats.
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Want to score an empty row? These routes and airlines are your best bet
Crunching Department of Transportation data on the number of empty seats on domestic flights between November 2023 and October 2024, travel booking platform Luxury Link identified the Southwest Airlines (LUV) flight between Atlanta and Missouri’s Jackson and a Delta Air Lines (DAL) one between Orlando and Miami as the routes that fly with the highest numbers of empty seats on average.
Each had a respective rate of 53.8% empty seats for 341-mile flight and 52.1% empty seats for a 192-mile flight.
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Overall, low-cost airlines and short routes tend to run with empty seats much more frequently. Texas-based Avelo Airlines, Utah-based Breeze (BREZ) and Denver-based Frontier Airlines (FTR) have the highest numbers of empty seats on their flights — for each, the average hovers at or just over 25%.
“These higher vacancy rates can be attributed to differences in business models, including their focus on underserved markets and less-trafficked routes, which often result in lower passenger loads compared to major carriers,” write the report’s authors. “At the other end of the spectrum, larger carriers like Delta Air Lines, United Airlines (UAL) , and American Airlines (AAL) fly with some of the fullest flights, maintaining empty seat averages of just 14.5%, 15.9%, and 16.4%, respectively.
Breeze is another airline that flies with a larger number of empty seats.
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The report also looked at regional carriers such as Republic Airways and Skywest Airlines.
Looking deeper into the numbers: shorter vs. longer and mainstream vs. regional
Contracted by carriers to run flights between smaller cities or less popular destinations, they counterintuitively have lower empty seat rates because any flight they are chartered to run meets a specific need and serves customers without another option.
Republic and Skywest have a respective empty-seat rate of 20.8% and 19.8%.
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When it comes to specific routes, shorter flights between nearby cities tend to have much higher empty seat rates than larger cross-country ones. Shorter flights are less fuel-costly to run and, as a result, airlines’ strategy is to keep them in the network even if passenger numbers are not very high.
The Southwest flight between Atlanta and Nashville was the route with the third-highest empty seat rate in the report: 46.8% average for a 214-mile flight. The Spirit Airlines (SAVE) flight between Fort Lauderdale in Florida and Christiansted in Virginia has the highest empty-seat route in the long route category: 40.8% for an 1,140-mile flight.
“Airlines also tend to schedule frequent departures on short routes to offer flexibility and convenience, which spreads passengers across multiple flights and reduces load factors,” the report reads further. “Additionally, demand on these routes can be highly seasonal or irregular, particularly for flights serving tourist destinations or rural areas, leading to more empty seats during off-peak times.”
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