Originally Posted by
maradori
Out of curiosity, a bunch of discussion going on is about the guaranteed Y privilege. Looping back to the original post, has anyone used the "priority reservation waitlist" benefit, or can someone describe that in more detail?
Basically they guarantee that you'll get onto any flight you want, if you buy a full-Y ticket, even if the flight is heavily overbooked.
Considering that the planes are mostly full of leisure travellers anyways (business travel has largely gone the way of the do-do bird), this 'benefit' basically costs AC nothing. Heck, I'm surprised that any flight ever gets zero'ed out -- there's almost always certainly to be someone on any flight who will take an VDB compensation offer that is less than the full-Y fare.
Some fares allow for people to buy a ticket without confirmed segments. Again, usually very high fare buckets that even most SE's don't even buy anymore (most 'discount' fares require confirmation of all segments at the time of booking!). Priority waitlisting just means that if space becomes available, the segments are confirmed in preference to other customers who may also be on the same waitlist. Mostly its a holdover from the old days when there may only have been one flight a week to, say, Bangkok, discounting less prevalent, alliances non-existent, and the consequences of not getting on a flight literally meant that the remaining options were far less savoury.
"Back then", people bought a lot more full-Y or full-J tickets, often with multiple reservations (ie: a businessman might have made 2 or 3 reservations depending upon anticipated events during a trip), so the planes, at least on paper, appeared to have a lot more passengers on them than actually showed up. So waitlisting was actually quite common. Today, there's so many options for re-routing possible, and significant surveillance by the airlines for multiple overlapping reservations that this is not a tactic used by business travellers. An AC FA friend of mine, in the 80s, told me she used to book a parallel full-J reservation for each personal trip she took, cancelling (and refunding) the segments if she was able to get on the plane as a non-rev. This is why the industry had to turn significantly to overbooking -- not because an abundance of people were buying tickets and throwing them out, but rather, there was significant abuse of refundable tickets.