The Revenue Integrity/Yield Management side of United is wholly and completely detached from the MileagePlus/Touchy-Feely side of United.
It is true last minute fares generate more revenue and therefore any program that looks at revenue may seem to "incentivize" last minute/high fare class purchases, but those passengers will be buying last minute seats with or without GS and United is not "holding" inventory to placate anyone. They have a boatload of historical data reflecting demand/advance purchase trends on specific city pairs and manage fares to yield the maximum possible revenue.
Also remember that high fare buckets are frequently authorized for oversale (yes, even in the C/F cabins) so just because someone buys a last minute F fare doesn't mean that there was necessarily diminished availability of cheap buckets.
Hypothetically speaking, if there's a route where the data shows 0 purchases within 7 days and 0 purchases of full-fare tickets outside of 7 days they could and would sell cheap(er) fares up to the aircraft capacity and offer a token number of oversold full fare seats "just in case"
Originally Posted by
dkc715
I think it is fair to assume most 1Ks buy a mix of discount economy and discount first class fares, and GS buy mostly E, B, Z, A, F and J fares. I am sure there are exceptions, but after reading the GS qualification thread this seems to be a reasonable conclusion.
Ehhh... Obviously I have my own lens and it's distorted by a number of factors but I buy maybe 3 "cheap" (leisure) tickets a year. The rest of my spending is (in order, greatest to least # of tickets) B, A, Y, F. I've consistently spent $20k+ for as long as I've been paying attention and finished last year with $24,990 in PQD.
This is my first year qualifying as a 1K (and now that I have it I'm doing stupid things to make sure I maintain it... me likey), but I only spent about $3k more than I did last year as a plat.
Arguably I was actually more valuable on a pure cost basis to United as a plat because they got $20k out of me for 30 fewer (qualifying) segments that they had to fly my rear end around.