Originally Posted by
keatingfamily
I just booked a B fare to Tokyo for 2.5x the coach fare. There are 33 seats in business class. When I called to use the certificate, there aren't any seats available.
How are there no seats available? It's just because Delta is trying to bait and switch its best customers. So glad Southwest is finally in Atlanta. I now have a way to "reward" Delta.
For this trip I ended up buying an actual business class seat through LAX instead of direct and will give my money to Korean Airlines from Tokyo to Seoul and from Seoul back home.
It's not the only reason there aren't seats available, but you kind of answered your own question. If Z isn't available a lot of people will instead buy J. You did it; I used to do it all the time.
As far as usefulness of SWUs - back in '08 thru '10 when paid J was no longer the cool thing to do I had pretty much a 100% hit rate using SWUs. Once things tightened up and companies (including mine) started paying J again, finding advanced Z inventory got a lot harder. At least for the routes I travel. I no longer choose SWUs. It's a chore to use them, the process would sometimes backfire in spectacular fashion, but mainly I was finding that 90% of the time Z wasn't available at booking (1-3 weeks out) and I wasn't going to risk the gate upgrade game. Paid J it is. I'm sure there are a lot like me out there which is a huge win for DL... These guys aren't dumb.