Originally Posted by
channa
...And I think CO's eyes are starting to open on some of these counter-intuitive items. They're making good revenue on the ELR seats, yet they have very little inventory to sell. Imagine all those Elite-heavy flights where they have no inventory to sell. If they had E+, they'd be able to sell a chunk of that.
The fuzzy part is how much of it do you attribute to Elite members flying/returning to the carrier? In other words, how many people left CO because of piss-poor upgrade rates and crappy Y seats who may not have? And how many OAL Elites would have jumped on the CO bandwagon had CO had it?...
I agree. I saw the ELR revenue numbers, and remember thinking that the CO brass must be thinking that E+ just might be a big winner. Every time I book a UA ticket now I buy E+ on the spot, so I know they make money off of me, and having that option on an airline that I can't upgrade (easily) on is HUGE. If my upgrade rates were as bad as yours out of SFO I certainly wouldn't fly CO either, because the CO Y product is really marginal.