With Delta experimenting with First Class Monetisation, holding back or severely limiting V upgrade inventory on many flights, I had a thought.

Right now, there are some reasonable discounted First Class "A Class" fares on select routes. For instance LAX-FLL, some 5 hours, is about $260 each way more than the lower coach fares, booked into A class - pretty reasonable for guaranteed F on a 5 hour flight.

However if your itinerary goes from XXX-LAX-FLL, their is often no A fare offered. The best priced F fare can be as much as $700 more (each way!) because of the one extra connecting leg. To add insult to injury, in many cases there isn't even First Class offered on the connecting leg (CRJ-200s).

I often fly YYC-SLC-XXX and the YYC-SLC is all coach CRJ-200 (despite being scheduled over 2 hours ). As a result, there are often no A fares loaded for routings that include this flight.

Rather than only offering the whole itinerary as an A fare, I'd be interested to hear other FT'ers thoughts on a modification whereby DL allowed one to buy-up on specific segments only. They could charge the difference between the published fare for the fare class booked for that segment (e.g. L, K etc), and the respective A fare that is in effect for that segment.

There are virtually no decent A fares in/out of Canada with the exception of some recently loaded fares to YUL. It's still $2k roundtrip from YYC to most US destinations, and when there isn't even an F cabin on the originating flight, it's just not worth it.

However if I could "buy-up" for just the segments that actually have a First cabin, and which offer an A fare, I'd be much more likely to consider this if the A fare upgrade was reasonable.

This would be kind of a hybrid between the NWA Domestic E-First upgrade program which offered $50-$250 flat rate upgrades, but at the gate only - and between the current DL FCM "A Fare" experiment where you have to have an A fare actually published for your entire itinerary, but where you book right into F up front.

Thoughts?