Hello!
My flight to Zurich departs on 8/24 and I am taking Icelandair (from Newark). I've been eyeing up the Swiss/United direct flight just to simplify things, however it looks like there are only 27 seats reserved at this point. Even fewer seats are reserved on the same flight on the 25th. Has anyone heard about Swissair (or United) cancelling under-booked flights? If not, what a way to social distance, eh?
Thanks for any intel. :)
Not everyone choses to pay extra to make a seat selection in advance when they buy a plane ticket. I would not go by what you see based on the seat map
Good point!
In addition, airlines also make money flying cargo, so even a flight without passengers can be profitable and far from under-booked.
Check Flight Aware to see if your flights actually have been flying. We discovered that our British Air flights haven't been flying since March 2020.
Also see the OP here on the Forum regarding airlines' cutbacks.
Safe travels!
Hi Cronmoax, I’m traveling with Swiss Air in a little over 2 weeks. There have been no schedule changes. The only thing they have done is changed planes to bigger planes, so I take that as a good sign. Like Jazz says, not everyone pays extra to pick their seats ahead of time. And when I check the seats for my flights, I can’t even see the better classes. So, those might be all booked.
I'm learning so much! Thanks team :)
also remember some flights are necessary for positioning of crew or equipment, so they go empty or full. you can find videos on Youtube of huge planes flying with only one or two pax.
Swiss Air and Edelweiss are really screwy right now, so be careful that what you are looking at is a real flight.
I found a nonstop Edelweiss ticket from Tampa to Zurich and I even went on the Edelweiss website to select seats for this flight. The plane was showing wide open. So I figured I'd wait a couple of weeks to book to see how covid was shaking out during August. Meantime, I planned a whole trip to Switzerland based on this nonstop flight.
When I went back to Edelweiss / Swiss last week to purchase the tickets, the nonstop flight had vanished! It turns out Edelweiss never did reinstate their Tampa nonstop, which has been cancelled since March 2020. In further research, I also noticed that United seems to have "taken over" the Swiss flights to Zurich out of ORD and IAD. Looks like those too, were never reinstated.
I refuse to fly on a domestic carrier right now (they are absolutely horrible) unless it is alaska or southwest, and my covid rule is no connections unless you absolutely can't avoid it.
We are now booked on a real Air France flight to France and Switzerland will wait until next year.
I also noticed that United seems to have "taken over" the Swiss
flights to Zurich out of ORD and IAD.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. I’m on a Swiss Air flight out of O’Hare to Zurich on Sept. 2nd. It’s an actual Swiss Air flight, LX 9, operated by Swiss, not United. You can search on Swiss.com to view their flights.
I see that flight now Carrie... it is actually a daily. I don't remember that showing up last time I looked at google. Maybe google is still catching up to the revised flight schedules. United definitely has the lock going out of IAD and EWR, which were served by Swiss before.
