Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
There's the problem for me. Economy is literally quite painful for anything more than 90 minutes of flight time.
I couldn't use most of my AA SWUs last year because they are worse than DL about releasing upgrade seats in advance. I can usually only book a few months in advance at the most.
I won't book longhaul in economy unless I can get immediate confirmation of an upgrade. By the time you can get it in UA or AA, then the cheap fare buckets are closed, so I still end up with a Y,B,M level of fare.
I have been pretty successful in finding Z availability on Delta in most cases.
I feel your pain. I'm 6'3" and hate economy. I even find the old WBC seats on DL to be very uncomfortable. Most of my UGs don't clear at booking. I can rarely book more than 2 or 3 weeks out which means I can't get Z so I'm looking at tickets that are $6k to $8k RT. For 10 RTs per year that works out to an extra $60k to avoid one or two flights in Y over the course of the year. Hard for me to justify. Before I left DL, I was buying 4 Y seats in the middle, which I could often get for less than $3k RT. Another approach is just to buy a new biz class ticket at the gate if it looks like you're not going to clear on the UG.