Originally Posted by
BenA
The harm is that people may start booking economy tickets, knowing they can consistently upgrade to business for a fraction of the retail price at the airport. And KLM was often selling the day of departure upgrades first come first served *before* processing waitlisted GUC instruments, thereby skipping over any sort of upgrade priority list. Delta doesn’t offer a departure day buy up option at any other airport for their own flights - it was only a KLM program at AMS.
I know that I had previously changed my booking patterns to account for the easy availability of day of departure upgrades at AMS, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one.
I'm genuinely curious on whether the data supports this. The venn diagram of people who are not paying with OPM for business class (who would just buy outright) and the folks that wouldn't be able to find relatively inexpensive D1 pricing given Delta's discounting on low demand times must be relatively small. The upgrade costs usually ends up being around $750-1000 one way, so $1600-2000 round trip. Certainly a big discount relative to a walk-up J fare but when you add in a $1000 base ticket, $2500-3000 is well within the range you can find discounted D1 tickets for. I could go buy a $3,600 D1 ticket departing mid-March
nonstop from Atlanta, so that is only a $600 premium from a DoD upgrade. If I go to April Delta will sell it for $2600 - again, nonstop. On those it would actually be more expensive to buy an Economy ticket and then pay the AMS upgrade fees (at least on a round-trip basis).
If they're afraid of people buying a last minute Y ticket and then upgrading at the airport, they could easily restrict that by requiring the fare have been purchased > 7 or 14 days out, etc.
Agree on the GUC issue, but I doubt that is the root cause. Delta doesn't care whether or not GUCs clear and they consistently make every effort to reduce GUC redemption rates (insanely discounted D1 fares during low demand periods, shrinking D1 cabins, etc).