Originally Posted by
Carl Johnson
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.
I agree, $1200 is probably a fair price.
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?
10% is my estimate of the chances that a Diamond would get a free upgrade JFK-{LAX,SFO} if they were still possible. It might be lower; I wasn't much above that when I was Diamond and they were available.
For Platinums, it's more like 1%.
I really can't see anyone not buying J due to such a small chance of a free upgrade. (In fact, I think it more likely that a DM will take RUCs and use them to upgrade if available at purchase, which would cost a J sale. Also, LAX-JFK upgraded in advance with RUC allows use of the special check-in area, etc., which presumably has some cost for Delta.)