Originally Posted by
mduell
How dumb do people think the airlines revenue management is?
"Golly, we haven't sold any business class seats 6 months in advance, may as well start giving out upgrades." No sense in looking at historical sales curves...
I have written multiple times about GPUs and RPUs in this forum. First of all, United provides these instruments as a result of miles flown by elite members. They are not "free" with respect to United deciding to "give them away". We pay for these multiple times over with our paid tickets. Second, I have also been frustrated with a completely empty business class cabin and no confirmable upgrades months in advance for off-peak travel (London Heathrow from Chicago in February, mid-week). I do not agree that there should not be some confirmable space for upgrades on these flights months ahead. However, that said, I just booked a confirmed GPU on this route two days ago because I checked multiple times weekly about availability since June, 2017. Usually weekend days are the best chance to secure a confirmed upgrade, but I have also had lots of success in the past during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is how I was able to confirm the ORD-LHR GPUs.
Clearly opposite interpretations of GPU/RPUs. Most of us think its a benefit where we still must pay a "copay" (W fare) for our hard earned loyalty after spending thousands of dollars and hours in order to sit in a seat that would probably otherwise go out empty. UA values loyalty at $0 so they think GPU/RPUs are a nuisance costing them thousands of dollars every time one clears.
Originally Posted by
Kacee
It's not hard to check all UA TPACs at once for a given day using expert mode. If you search, for example, SFO-HKG, .com will show all the UA TPACs with connections on various *A partners onward to HKG. So one search returns all UA flights for a particular day.
I would estimate that I=0 R>0 occurs easily at least 75% of the time. So if you rely on an I alert for R, you're missing out on open upgrade space at least three-quarters of the time. If you're satisfied with that, great
One search wouldn't give you all TPACs, only flights for one origin-destination. (SFO-HKG, ORD-HKG, EWR-HKG, SFO-NRT, ORD-NRT, etc etc) If you wanted to see all UA TPACs for a given day, you'll need to search every UA TPAC route separately, then the returns.
Lately, I can only get a dozen or so searches in before I start getting "The Page Encountered an Error Processing your Request" and have to stop and come back later