Originally Posted by
jasepl
It happens more often than you would imagine, on all sorts of airlines.
BA and LH, for example, often sell sell only J tickets even if the plane has a First cabin, and then let J passengers pick the First seats (priority to Golds and those on higher fares). So it's not an upgrade, just a better seat.
Usually, this happens for operational reasons (aircraft subs or unavailability of the regular model), but commercial reasons can drive it too.
In your case, it was just the one J passenger, so it would have been crazy to upgrade so many Y passengers and incur the expense of providing a full J service. It is definitely more prudent to do what they did.
If it were just a couple of empty J seats (highly unlikely on this sector,
regardless of what the JP kids tell us), things may have been different.
And do you really think Jet know the first thing about goodwill?
Absolutely not true of LH or BA. I've been SEN on LH for 14 years, and GOld on BA 2000-2009 then silver to date and I've never seen this happen.
A 3 class service (4 in the case of BA) route advertised as such is sold and operated as such irrespective of load. For tech or op reasons this may have very very rarely happened if a 3 class acft was used on a 2 class service route (eg the afternoon LHR-DEL departure on BA) but by no means "often". And no way would either airline downgrade a service if there was even one passenger ticketed in the cabin class, which is what Jet seems to be doing.
I'm flying them in J Bombay BKK tomorrow and I shall be very cross if they do this