Originally Posted by
the_godfather
I just mentioned it because I am making the distinction between WU (upgraded to W) vs. W. I complained when I bought the ticket because it was after they announced the change to the upgrade policy (to upgrade based on the higher person's status), but before they had implemented it. So they actually issued me a new ticket with the W fare. I don't know much about the architecture of the fare classes. But if fare class comes into account for upgrade priority, I would think that the W is a higher class. So are you saying that it is not a fare class at all, rather on top of a regular fare (whatever was the fare class when I bought my ticket)? And therefore there is no class difference between WU vs. W?
The answer is we don't know. Before the introduction of Comfort+ as a separate fare class, it was pretty clear that upgrade priority in order of fare class started as Y, then B, and so on.
It has gotten less clear since W was introduced, but clearly many W fares (those that are are mark-ups from low coach fares) are much cheaper than the Y fare on any given route, so it wouldn't seem totally fiar to give even the cheapest W fares priority over all regular coach fares.
It is possible it was too hard to program their computers in a way that addressed that discrepancy, or too hard to come up with a more fair methodology (since the relative value of fare classes can get very complicated, for example once you account for the various fares that might be paid by various connecting passengers), and so maybe W does take priority. But if that were the case, I suspect Delta would note that prominently somewhere, so to encourage people to spend extra on W fares. Since they haven't, I suspect W isn't a trump card, but I could be wrong.