Originally Posted by
mczlaw
Clarification? Are you saying the seats are going out empty? Or are they upgrading gateside? If the latter, isn't AS is (sort of) rewarding loyalty, but just making elites sweat it out while AS attempts lamely to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of the F cabin? (BTW, wasn't this kind of bean counting shenanigans what many pundits predicted when they elevated Tilden to CEO?) I read the transcript of the Q2 earnings call and was struck with the extent to which AS is now pandering to the Wall Street crowd relative to restricting saver award inventory (not to mention the other "enhancements" adopted by AS in recent years).
If there were ever a domestic flight where a premium seat should be in demand, it would be on an overnight flight as otherwise, it can be quite a miserable experience. If the flight is leaving in less than 2 hours and zero F seats are sold and nobody has been upgraded, that would mean that nobody got upgraded or bought an F ticket in advance. Who knows if at the gate some people were given last minute upgrades but if the cabin is empty and there are high level elites booked, would it really be necessary to wait until right before flight time? Will be interesting to see the current and next quarters financial results with the raising of close in F award seats to ridiculous point levels. I would expect it would do more to drive people to other carriers than to get people to use up 70,000 points one way to get to from one coast to the other.