Originally Posted by Vermando

It's an unprofitable industry whose major players continually go bankrupt. I don't think their track record and inane to their rationality appeals makes them immune from criticism from their customers.

Substantively, your analysis is wrong for the reasons everyone here is giving. The important metric is not maximizing the revenue for every flight or seat, but the profit per customer.

If a customer will steer tens of thousands of dollars of high margin business to you instead of your competitor (because someone else is paying for it) in exchange for flying him and his wife first class domestically a few times a year, you'd be stupid to sell the domestic F seats to someone else for an extra $50. Or at least, you'd need to be sure you're calculating your lost margin on the other flights in making your comparison.

Bottom-line - a per customer profitability view is superior to a per flight or per seat view. CO has moved recently to the latter, and it is now pulling UA with it. FFers are sticky enough in their loyalty that in the short-term this will likely be profitable; the long-run effects are less certain, and we're certainly in our right to indicate what its effect on our buying patterns will be.