Originally Posted by
Peninsula
I'm not happy about these at all. There's a permanence to this that bothers me. Impose a fuel surcharge on reward travel if you like, but don't mask it elsewhere or call it by a different name. These are the types of changes CO will "forget" to relax once economic conditions reverse.
What makes you think that fuel surcharges would be rolled back?
They are actually not masking it - they are calling it what it is. It is a fee to upgrade/redeem inside a time window/redeposit a reward. The redeposit one will hurt a lot; the others don't affect me personally all that much.
I'm intrigued by the instant ticketing and how that is supposed to be a benefit for us as passengers. Online we've always had that option. I guess this way we also get the 24-hour change/cancel/refund on phone bookings, too. One thing this might do is formalize the forgiveness of the change fee to buy up to a higher class of service for folks who have to buy through a TA or lowest available fare for business purposes and then paying up to eiter a 100% EQM fare or a Y-up or something like that. That's the only real up-side I can see from this announcement, but it is a stretch.