Seatmaps and Sale with Seat Numbers
The schedule operates with the sale configurations. Creating a sale configuration and flight schedule is enough for running sale without seat selection.
But in order to run sale with seat selection, a sale configuration which is used in the schedule should be associated with a physical configuration. Number on seats in cabins of sale configuration may be less than that in the physical one. Still all saleable seats should be marked in the cabins, as amount and volume of saleable cabins should correspond to the sale configuration parameters.
Seat map is a layout of aircraft, which enables to run sale with seat selection on the given leg of a flight. Seatmap is configured along with the flight inventory.
Configurations are managed in the carrier dictionary section. You may view flight seatmap and approve seat booking on the inventory screen. You may also choose a seat for a passenger from PNR management screen.
The rules of automatic approval of reservation with seat selection and configuring broken seats in the cabin is made via "Seats" business rules.
An airline may run sale with and without seat selection at the same time, but for different flights on different dates. In order to run sale without seat selection, it is sufficient to use sale configuration only, no physical configuration is needed.
For sale with seat selection it is mandatory to create physical configuration and attach it to the sale configuration in use. Such attachment is possible given that the total number of seats in all cabins of the physical configuration is not less than that in the sale configuration. Names and number of cabins in the configurations should not mandatorily match.