Originally Posted by
sdsearch
Christmas is only a peak time for personal travel. It's actually a slow time for business travel. And for this reason, it's a lot easier to find award seats in business/first class at Christmastime than in coach (at least domestically). But of course, most families (or even most individuals) don't consider paying double (or more?) of the miles just to get a seat up front, when all they wanted was to travel cheaply for their Christmas trip. So I've found (on the routes that I've looked at) that those business class awards can persist for a while, on Christmastime routes that pretty much never had coach awards available. That does seem 'effective' for the airline.
Similarly, many domestic airlines have an "anytime" award for "just" double to triple the miles available on most any of their own flights until it's sold out, but again most families (and most individuals) ignore that because it goes against their idea of "value" (and/or because they haven't accumulated enough miles to "afford" those). The airlines play with the award cost of "anytime" awards to make sure they don't substitute much for paid travel, so that does seem "effective" for them.
Right, but OP is talking about marketing to and targeting families who aren't frequent travelers, but who will want to take up a bunch of seats all at the same time, not FTers who know how to work the system and who may be doing solo travel internationally. Of course there's a lot of F/C seats that aren't occupied by business travelers during Christmas/summer, but dropping half a million miles or more on travel to take out a longhaul F cabin isn't very typical for a family... and the airline would rather fill seats with paid customers in coach at those peak coach travel times. So marketing to those families who typically are looking to travel in Y for free doesn't really work; it's counterproductive (not to mention the fact that small F cabins rapidly become full if you give away the whole cabin to a family who decided to churn some cards- are you really suggesting that airlines should market to MS/card churners/FTers who know the ins and outs of things and can exploit them to maximum potential?)
Also, I suspect that as time goes by, airlines will be better at upselling J/F during peak travel periods. Sort of hard to upsell a seat you gave away for miles. Also hard to op-up someone into J/F because of a full Y cabin if you gave all the seats away to an entire family traveling to see Grandma on their miles they got via manufactured spend...