Originally Posted by
destere
You're right. F is now used as an incentive for non-F travellers as much as it is a product in it's own right.
Suppose it's part of the reason why BA wanted to retain the same number of seats in the F cabin when NF was developed - redemptions and upgrades.
I think it is more that BA has certain routes where they can sell 14 F seats or close to it (let's say more than 8 that CX, LH or AF have) and when you calculate the incremental revenue of F tickets over not having inventory, it made sense to have the capacity which then could also be used for upgrades when not sold if BA wished.
The big point is they didn't seem to want to create sub-fleets with various numbers of F seats. I guess once you figure Hi-J, Low-J etc you can have too many configurations which would muck thinks up with IRROPs.