Dummy bookings as indicator of demand
We all know that in general, airlines use booked seats as an indicator of demand for a flight, and price seats accordingly
How much information value is there in dummy (i.e. not paid) bookings as a predictor of real demand ? I'm not interested in the Internet legends that say airlines change the price the moment you show interest based on a cookie set on your computer. I'm interested instead as to whether a large (or small) number of dummy bookings from a wide range of non-bot sources (filter out certain IP address ranges) can be profitably used to determine whether a ticket price should be changed