Originally Posted by mrcimino1

Things have changed over the years, OP!

No longer do you find a sizable number of people who are willing to actually "pay real money" for premium service up front. Let's face it, the largest DOMESTIC carrier in this country doesn't even have a FC cabin!!

Over the last 10 years, it has been a continuous spiral downward as far as service in FC is concerned. The bean counters say that the airlines are not getting enough higher fares up front to warrant spending extra money on the "premium service and meals". Just a bunch of free-loading Elites sitting up there. So the standards are lowered. The passengers then increasingly see little advantage to sitting up front, so fewer of them are willing to pay a premium fare for it. Then the bean counters say "Look, the demand has decreased again. We need to decrease what we are spending for those sitting in FC." And on and on......

Over the years, CO and NW had sought to court the higher fares that AA, UA, and DL were able to command on their non-stop tanscon's by offering decent meal service up front on connecting flights, while the Big 3 lowered their standards. Now NW is gone, assimilated into DL, leaving CO as the sole "underdog" that chooses to offer a quality product, but solely for marketing purposes. Certainly not because they feel that any FF'ers with free upgrades are entitled to a premium product when they paid only a cheap coach fare. CO has been able to shrink their FC cabins so that they more closely match the demand for the higher fares that actually get "paying passengers" into those seats upfront! It's their way of saying that the goodies are reserved for the people who actually pay for them, and not for some of us who have been paying the lowest fares and free-loading our way up front with our Elite Status. Meanwhile, DL continues to offer a decent number of FC seats on mainline planes, so higher level Elites are going to get a reasonable number of upgrades, but since they really aren't paying for any premium service, why should DL actually provide it?

You can thank the Bush Administration for approving the decreased competition in the US domestic airline industry. The playing field has changed, and you get what you get these days. Or more exactly, we are moving closer and closer to "you get only what you pay for!"