Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
Best for whom?
UA would then lose the revenue from cash upgrades.
There is the flip-slide of rewarding your frequent customers , .... but revenue seems be the more important metric for UA. (it is a for-profit company)
Now we can all go down the route it would be better for UA to have happy customers, but we have had that discussion dozens of times -- and the demonstrated actions of UA is all that matters and that is not their present modus operandi regardless of what we might think on FT.
Yes it is easy to calculate the immediate gains/loses and that is all UA considers. It takes more work to calculate the long term gains/loses when it comes to loyalty and happy customers so they dont bother. Now, (my original reply form months ago that someone dug up), how many people actually change airlines due to not getting upgrades or even this incident, I'd say very few to none. No short term effect, maybe contributing to a long term effect.
Originally Posted by
Kacee
Yes, they absolutely do. First, the passenger buys an economy ticket he or she might not otherwise buy (might have either flown another airline, or not at all). Second, the passenger must buy a W fare or higher to use the GPU. The typical W premium is in the $200-500 range per roundtrip. UA keeps that money regardless whether the upgrade clears.
Also, you can argue that by upgrading you, they've freed up a Y seat they can now sell. If J isn't going to be full anyways, UA does not lose anything by upgrading you. If they can't fill the Y seat, then don't gain anything either but it wouldnt have made any difference. They only lose something if they could have otherwise sold the J seat. I recall an old thread where someone had dinner with someone who works at UA corporate and the UA employee said UA hates GPU's because they are losing thousands of dollars (the full cost of a J ticket). I'm sure this is their mindset but they ignore the fact that we already bought a Y ticket, paid for a higher fare bucket, and however you define loyalty, if you're 1K, you've probably locked in most of you travel spending to UA. But "loyalty" does not enter into their mindset. It's only immediate cost.
I'll say this if I was just starting out with no status and UA had no CPUs or GPUs, but Delta or AA did, I certainly wouldn't choose UA. I remember, the primary reason I chose UA was that they had E+ and at the time AA, US, DL, NW, either did not have it or it was very limited.