I think it's important that we don't conflate the term "common sense" with both service recovery and asking airline staff to "go the extra mile" for customers.

Firstly, service recovery is a separate issue and I totally agree that should be in the domain of a member of staff who can make decisions and make up for a customer not getting what they reasonably agreed with the airline through purchasing a ticket. I don't think any disputes that every airline could improve this aspect, no matter the complexity of products on offer.

The second issue is more nuanced I think - you've got two competing sets of interests here, the customer who wants more than what he or she is strictly entitled to, and the airline, which wants to maximise profits by making sure costs are minimised (e.g. making sure there are no delays, staff are productive) and revenue is maximised.

In a sense, the entire front facing operation of a hospitality business is to keep customers very, very far away from the revenue people and the cold hard truth - that customers are just revenue streams to be maximised in order to generate maximum return from capital invested. More bluntly, that really means expectation management - both trying to spark some positive emotions (e.g. wow, IFE is really awesome on EK), and reducing the impact of negatives, which is why in someone's rational calculation somewhere, it's better to irritate with a "computer says no" response, rather than give an understandable but unpleasant explanation of "it's not worth it to us to do this for you".

I'm sure everyone posting here has one or two memories of a really exceptional hospitality experience - invariably it's because the staff involved have gone above and beyond and really done something special where they didn't "have" to. The trick for the company though is to make that feeling happen without sacrificing your profit margins - which means it has to necessarily be exceptional (or at least factored into the business plan) or it becomes part of the pricing.

However, the fundamental mismatch here is that customers are spending a lot of $$$ and therefore expect "exceptional if required" to be part of the pricing, whereas for the airline, the price and product are already factored into the business plan and the big $$$ a customer spends gets entitles them to an exact product which is fully costed and fully transparent.

That's why when the term "common sense" is used, I think you have to be very careful that you actually don't mean "I've paid a lot of money so you should give me a little more that I don't think costs you anything; in fact, as I don't think it costs anything I don't see why you don't do it for me" - because passengers might not appreciate that there are actual costs involved.

In the example about moving to an earlier award flight on CX, I'd say that was a situation where the customer is asking for a favor from the airline. From the customer's point of view, there are empty seats and they are all the same, so why can't it be done?

However, from the airline's point of view, what you are asking is to make all Z class seats fully flexible on the day of travel, on a space-available basis. Which means that somewhere, some effort needs to be put into thinking about: logistics (what if the pax on the late night flight comes in the morning, we need to have catering and perhaps crew for the cabin if it's empty), revenue (if we now have 2 Z pax all day and 6/8 on the morning flight, what's the potential lost revenue if those two Z pax move to the morning flight and then a couple willing to spend full F for those flights comes afterwards?), among other things. What about marketing: do we really want to be seen as packing our cabins with award travellers all the time - does it damage the product? What if the cabin crew mess up their training and don't serve the full fare pax first? etc. etc.

Are the additional real costs of flexibility (additional logistical costs) or opportunity costs (could have sold that empty seat to a last, last minute traveller for lots of money - and the airline will have historical data on the probability of that) worth it to please someone who has already paid x amount of cash? Or is the award ticket revenue enough for all this hassle? Especially in an era of no loyalty to airlines anyway?

One could then say: "oh, but it's only just this once for this one traveller" - but of course that is never true as the same encounter is repeated tens of times a day, every day. That's why you run through the scenario and process and come up with an answer: no, Z class is opened on a per flight basis only, end of story.

Do you want to explain the reasoning behind denying a request from a passenger, or is it much, much easier, for everyone concerned to simply say: "I'm sorry sir, there is no availability in the fare class of your ticket on that flight". Slightly irritated is, imho, a better expectation outcome than telling a passenger he's not worth it to go to the extra trouble to do it for him - or to explain that if they gave it to him, they would have to do it to everyone else who is the same or a better customer than him - and to do it for so many people would undermine their profitability.

You get the same story with things like baggage allowance and change fees. Imagine you fly a lot with an airline and you ask for a waiver on baggage and change fees - say once in 100 flights. You think it would be common sense for the airline to be lenient given your history, but the airline are inflexible because to the airline, allowing it on a case-by-case basis takes up a lot of time (review history/override system/write reports) but to allow it for every high status pax might cut 10-20% of your ancillary revenue - in the millions.

So in the end, what seems like a common sense request to an individual passenger is usually quite an often repeated request which has already been evaluated by the airline as to what happens if a significant percentage of their customer base asks for this additional thing. In the case it's not usual, then you have revenue saying - what's the point, why give them more than they already paid for. The worst thing that's going to happen is that they are gonna give you 8/10 instead of 9/10. So what - they'll still fly with us.

The balancing act comes for the airline comes in marrying the customer's exceptional/common-sense request, with the reality that these exceptional requests happen fairly regularly and have already been factored into the product's pricing and the company's systems.

That's probably why you shouldn't let the revenue management tail wag the operational dog, but that's my own personal opinion of the hospitality business