Originally Posted by
golfingboy
Therefore, they are intentionally holding back upgrades rather than just giving it to us and holding only an handful of F seats? I seriously doubt PIT-ORD has a lot of walk up full fares on a Saturday. Same goes for ORD-SLC that just passed the 1K window. Putting me at the whim of a mileage upgrader, someone who secured a 'sales' RPU/GPU, a customer who is on a flight where F is full and decides to switch over to my flight, elite customers who got rebooked in full Y in IRROPs trumping me in the queue despite buying a lower fare, etc.
sCO was like that [one time on 545am LGA-IAH the flight only had 2 of 20 F seats booked and not one upgrade was processed until 24 hours out], I was hoping they would do more of a hybrid approach in the merger by being more generous with releasing upgrade space at the window rather than holding back more than half of the F seats until they give up on trying to sell those seats.
More and more, my inclination is that UA has a TON of data piled up about exactly what they can sell F seats for as "TODs" (whether or not they are TOD, HOD, or ThOD) on every route, and they leverage that on each and every flight, when they think they can. I am thinking it has less and less to do with V-up or whatever other fares have been historically published in the market, and more to do with "I have 15 F seats open and a full boat in Y -- let's make a quick $2500 extra on this flight"
I am also starting to think that they know to some extent what we will put up with and we are upgraded somewhat accordingly almost on an individual basis. Case in point, I cleared LGA-DEN on a Sunday afternoon, at >24hr in advance. I would have never expected to clear that route (the only other flights I have cleared this year are ORD-SAV, DEN-GRR, CLE-EWR, and RDU-IAD). However I can no longer clear SMF-ORD even on a Saturday afternoon and I regularly see 1Ks in Y on off peak times, with what appears to be kettles in F. Even late last year, off peaks out of SMF to IAH and ORD were gimmes for me. So it seems like a little bit of
quid pro quo going on from UA...who knows. Both of these one off observations sort of feed my suspicion that UA is trying to strike a very delicate balance between some meager upgrade percentage for elites to "keep us interested" and maximizing revenue with a huge database of what has sold and what hasn't.