Finnair Plus - Finnair SH J class pricing xHEL with Sat-Sun stay - do they want sell those tickets?

I just booked a long weekend in Barcelona with BA in Club (HEL-LHR-BCN rtn) and naturally looked at AY J prices as well...they have direct flights from Helsinki with poor flight times for a short trip (late arrival, early departure) and the price was over twice of that what BA are asking..for this trip Y+upgrade was out of question for various reasons and my point is the general AY pricing in short haul J with Sat/Sun stay...seems to me that they just don't want to sell those seats at all..?

I totally agree. Who would pay ca. 1700 € for a R/T. In the worst case you would sit in an Embraer 190 without a seat block. British Airways HEL-LHR C cost approximately 400 € if books well in advance. Even Lufthansa has R/T tickets for 850 € to almost every destination in Europe. Unfortunately, Swiss does not fly to HEL. They have excellent week-end C class tickets.

I am not a professional in marketing and economics, but I find it odd that AY prefers to sell 190 € R/T tickets in Y and allows OW upgrades for 10 000 AY+ (the only good thing about in the AY+ programme) points rather than sell tickets for +/- 600 €. Knowing AY, I think they will rather increase the points to 20 000 AY+ because of the demand from the members than lower the restricted C class fares. AY might think that there is no need for leisure C class tickets because of the low demand for 99 € summer upgrades a few years ago, but one of the reasons was this fare only gave Y class earnings. Unfortunately, LH seems to take this approach for their even more reasonable C class restricted fares.

I am not a professional in marketing and economics, but I find it odd that AY prefers to sell 190 € R/T tickets in Y and allows OW upgrades for 10 000 AY+ (the only good thing about in the AY+ programme) points rather than sell tickets for +/- 600 €. Knowing AY, I think they will rather increase the points to 20 000 AY+ because of the demand from the members than lower the restricted C class fares.

Yep, it is odd, indeed..I think, however, that the 10k points oneway upgrade is rather steep for the general AY Plus member, most of the whY tickets do not earn anything today and upgrade is 50% of the points required for whY award..10k is large amount of points to many "normal" (non-FT) flyers that I know ;)