Originally Posted by
BertieBadger
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.
The lost revenue, as I see it, is not necessarily directly from that event. I agree... it is unlikely that any one event would result in lost revenue
on that occasion. The lost revenue would come from others seeing that this strategy is successful and so it is quite possible that that perpetrator, or an observer nearby, might take a chance on not buying the higher grade ticket in future in the hope they would be successful in self-upgrading. Of course, they would need to accept that they might not be successful but the savings are so large and there being very little (or no) penalty for trying, I could imagine some people trying it on if it looked like it had any chance of success. Flygirl68 says that she has not seen it succeed but surely that is because of observant and competent crews and possibly assisted by passengers bringing it to their attention. I am simply saying that if we don't continue to bring this behaviour to attention of the crew then there will be an increasing chance of success.
My assertion that fares might go up is basic business rules... less income means lower margins so fares are likely to increase to maintain margin. You could claim that this is such a small percentage of BA's income that this alone is unlikely to affect prices and I would agree with that but it all goes into the business mix and so it might contribute.
Just my opinion
