What Are Blocked Airline Seats?

Blocked airline seats are seats an airline has taken out of open sale and reserved for a specific trade partner - a consolidator, tour operator, wholesaler or group organiser - before the actual passengers are known. The partner then sells or assigns those seats and supplies names later.

In the trade, "blocked seats" is an umbrella term. It covers series blocks across many dates, one-off group holds and fixed departure inventory for packaged tours. What they share is that the seat is spoken for while the name is still blank.

How a seat gets blocked

Technically, the airline creates a booking - often a group PNR - for a number of seats without names, or with placeholder names. That booking reduces the seats available for general sale on the flight. As the block holder supplies real names, the placeholders are replaced.

Commercially, the block exists because of an agreement. That might be a full series contract, a short-term hold on a busy date or a tour operator's allocation for a package programme. The agreement determines price, deposit, deadline and penalty.

Hard blocks and soft blocks

Practitioners sometimes distinguish two kinds of block, though airlines use their own terms and conditions:

Hard block

The holder has committed to pay for the seats whether or not it sells them, or has limited rights to return them. The airline is protected; the holder carries the risk. Pricing usually reflects that commitment.

Soft block

The holder can return unsold seats without penalty up to a release date. The airline keeps more risk, so the price advantage tends to be smaller and the airline may watch utilisation closely when deciding future allocations.

Why anyone blocks seats

For the airline, blocks provide early committed revenue and a trade partner motivated to fill the seats on routes it may not market heavily itself.

• Certainty on peak dates - a tour operator cannot sell a holiday package without knowing the flight is available.
• Fixed cost for packaging - a known seat cost lets operators price packages months in advance.
• Trade margin - consolidators earn the difference between the block price and what agents pay.
• Market position - having seats when others do not brings agents back to a supplier.

What happens to blocked seats nobody buys

Every block has an end point. Before departure, the holder must either name the seats or return them. Returned seats go back into the airline's inventory and may sell at the going public fare. Seats neither named nor returned in time may be charged, forfeited against the deposit or simply cancelled, depending on terms.

This is the part that keeps block holders busy. Illustrative example: a tour operator holding 40 seats on a departure sees only 31 packages sold ten days before the release date. It can sell the spare nine as flight-only seats through agents, combine them with another departure, or release them. Each option has a different cost.

What travel agents should check before buying

Blocked seats are usually sold under supplier terms, not the airline's public fare rules, so the answers can be quite different from what a traveller expects.

1. Is the seat confirmed now, or only on request from the supplier?
2. By when must you send the passenger name, and in what format?
3. What baggage and meal entitlement comes with the seat?
4. Are name changes, date changes or refunds allowed, and at what cost?
5. Who issues the ticket and when will you receive it?

Keeping track of blocked inventory

Holders of several blocks quickly find that spreadsheets cannot keep up with live sales across multiple agents. EazyPNR gives block holders a shared inventory that agents book against directly; the blocked airline seats page explains how it presents those seats to the trade.

Frequently asked questions