Seeking ticket on sold-out flight
 

I'm aware that about a day or two before a flight takes place it sometimes happens that a flight is sold out, only for someone with a confirmed seat on a flexible ticket to then change their travel plans and a seat suddenly becomes available for sale.
Clearly the airline now has inventory (i.e. a seat) to sell at short notice. The fare they charge might be high, but it still needs to be sold if the airline wants the revenue

Yes there might well be someone who happens to be searching the airline website / GDS desperately looking for a seat - and the seat will sell itself, but this is not guaranteed. As email is so common and (almost) free, would it perhaps make sense for airlines to set up a 'sorry this flight is full right now but leave us your email address and we will message you ASAP if a seat becomes free' facility on their website ? If spam / bots are a concern, then it should be possible to limit the feature to customers who have already registered with a specific email address and previously flown at least one flight (i.e. focus on genuine and most likely loyal customers)
Just seems like a cheap way to sell distressed inventory to customers who would probably happily pay a high price

Under IATA(?) rules it is agreed upon that Airlines may oversell by a certain percentage.
Hence the ‘volunteers for X-amount of funny money’ announcements you may hear at departure gates.
Funny money as in you get airline vouchers instead of real money if you agree to give up your seat and take a later flight.

I'm aware of overselling, but in overselling, well-established airlines presumably want to avoid an overly aggressive sales policy and deny boarding to ticketed passengers too often.

Earlier this afternoon, I changed a (already checked in) flight for tomorrow morning - as soon as my change went through I could see a seat magically appear on the airline website on what was previously a sold out flight so the computer has clearly decided it can sell one more seat. The question is then why the airline didn't allow customers who were already looking to register interest in the same flight so they could have (re-)sold my seat more quickly

In the good old pre internet days my travel agent would frequently put me on the "wait list" for some flights I needed to take but space was not available at the time of booking. I often joined several other hopefuls at say No 4 on the list, and I can't remember not eventually being confirmed for any flight. Of course that was in the days when travel agents could delay ticketing until the client was about to fly, and could hold multiple unpaid bookings for several flights on the same route for the same person. I may be completely wrong but I suspect that this is no longer possible?

Can’t blame IATA for that one. Government regulation is the source. But what isn’t always known is that an involuntary bump requires cash payment. In looking for volunteers there are no rules, hence the funny money offers.

Call the airline and ask to be put on waitlist. Locos may not do this but am sure network airlines still willing, if you have a flexible ticket.

Sounds like this is the wrong way around. Why should the airline take on the task of adding names to a wait list, with first come gets offered first, or they don't know you got another seat on another airline but did not tell them, or you change your mind and did not tell them, or they offer a seat and you turn it down for any other reason. How long are they going to wait for you to read your emails and take up the offer before offering it to the next on the list? How is all this going to work? Who is going to do this?

If you want a seat it is up to you to keep looking.
If a seat comes up the first to book it gets it.

All airlines, including locos now overbook. They almost always get it right and when they don’t they find volunteers and/or pay compensation.

That seems to be working for them.

If you can’t get a seat on a flight you should know that the capacity, plus their overbooking profile, is gone.

Why reinvent the wheel.

Not saying their procedures for oversales can’t be tweeked, they should be. But we only hear about when things go pear-shaped.

If wait listing made them money .... they would do it.

These days there is certainly the means to offer a waitlist style bid system if they wanted - just notify customers who have lodged an interest of the availablity and give them a quick link via email, text, or an app to check the price, confirm, and purchase. (Though I'm quite sure if they had a few people responding simultaneously the price would magically increase as the system picked up the multiple interest.)

ExXB
 

Not true. We never overbook. `granted we often get a few "internet check-in no shows" but we then fly with empty seats. Never, ever overbook.

The way wait-lists worked you could sometimes "beat the system".

You got put on the waitlist. This was actually a queue (a list of bookings). The system would run through the queue at regular intervals trying to match waitlists against available seats. Suppose someone cancelled a seat just after the queue has been worked. It takes time, even if the queue is worked again immediately, to get through to a booking that wants that just cancelled seat. If you knew that and had your own robot working only your bookings you could sometimes beat the airline system to the seat. Indeed, it was quite possible for someone to grab that seat by pure luck and phoning at the right moment.

Not certain who ‘We’ are. But if that is true your company is leaving money on the table. Even if only 25% of those no-shows seats were resold your bottom line would improve. And you would have happy passengers who could access an otherwise sold-out flight. And likely will result in other charges and sales being collected.

Managing oversales is an art, and needs to be implemented properly. But it can be lucrative.

Personally I hate to see an empty seat, for any reason. (Well, except if that seat is the one between me and my wife!)