Originally Posted by
sethb
There are people who are more likely to fly DL on those routes (or on other routes to gain status) if upgrades are available. Making upgrades available for those people would tend to increase revenues.
Most, perhaps all, of those people are unlikely to pay $1200 rather than $400 for a tcon round trip, so Delta isn't cannibalizing its own revenue by allowing upgrades. (Would you refrain from buying J if you had, say, about a 10% chance of a free upgrade?)
I dunno, $1200 seems to me to be a fair price for what is a pretty good product. It isn't like it was last year when Delta was much much too impressed with the quality of the service and charged much too much for it. In 2012, I worked my way from no status to silver to gold to platinum, and on the way to gold I flew a fair amount of paid J. Then in mid 2013, Delta started running the recliner seats pretty exclusively between SEA and JFK and I thought I wouldn't get any upgrades but they hiked their prices up to the moon.
For me, the issue is that the $1200 runs into money if you do it a lot and C+ isn't that bad (the flight isn't that long actually). It isn't upgrade possibility. Where's your 10% figure from? Your estimate of the upgrade chances now? I agree that it's at least that low, and right, that wouldn't keep me from buying J. And that's the main reason this may be misguided - taking away upgrades isn't actually going to change anything significantly, so why not let people have that (mostly illusory) possibility?