Originally Posted by
5khours
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.
I have found Delta usually releases Z seats in a trickle starting about 1 month or so before a flight as they get a better handle on how many Biz seats they are going to sell, where AA and UA release a batch of upgrades, then almost nothing until departure. I usually need to finagle which hub I go through in order to get the Z availability, but I can usually find it.
The lower fare levels with co-pay on cheap tickets is a double edge sword as it allows people on low fare tickets to suck up the advance upgrade availability.
C'est la vie. I have yet to find an airline that has all I want.