Originally Posted by
snaxmuppet
That is of course your choice but that is tantamount to burying your head in the sand while people around you steal from you. Yes, I say steal from you because that lost revenue puts up everyone's fares... including yours.
Maybe I'm being dense but I don't see how this follows. To be clear, I'm not condoning the act of self-upgrading, but it seems to me that of the arguments that may be laid against it, this one is somewhat weak at best.
Firstly, where is the lost revenue? To claim that there is surely presupposes that the upgrader would otherwise be happy to pay the fare for the higher cabin if they knew their scheme had no chance of success. Yet I see no evidence this is the case. If the lost revenue is purported to come from
others who would be happy to pay for the higher cabin but now decide to adopt the self-upgrade strategy, then that is surely dependant upon successful execution of that plan - and if we take
flygirl68's experience as representative, that is very much not the normal outcome.
Secondly, even if we accept that there
is lost revenue, why would that mean fares go up? I won't claim to understand the dark arts of airline revenue mgmt, but consider when someone has a choice between e.g. BA and Virgin and chooses the latter. That is (genuine) "lost revenue" - do BA fares rise? I don't see that they do.
So perhaps I've missed something in your argument and would welcome if you could expand upon it.