Originally Posted by
CO FF
If I were in a cost-control mode, until it was time to renovate the entire J product, I would leave the old F seats in Zone A & reserve Zone A for full-J pax until checkin (and highest-level elites after that). Plus, I would leave those seats empty as long as possible to give those pax even more benefit.
But, then again, nobody has asked me to run an airline lately...
True, that would be cheaper. But what it will mean is QF will fly three J seats across it's fleet, roughly half of which will not be lie-flat.
That will mess with customer's expectations (especially if there are frequent equipments swaps between J/Y+/Y 744s and J/Y+/Y 380s). Doing the full conversion gets the extra 4 seats (and thus some sort of ROI figure, even if it isn't that close) and also means every QF J pax knows they will get a lie-flat. You can't a decent number of SkybedMkIIs in the current 744 J cabins. I'm willing to bet they have to take out F to make the numbers work.