I was going to book a IAD-LHR flight. The seat buckets indicated all 9s in all classes but no upgrades to C were available at booking. I felt rather confident with the apparently wide open flight but decided to call anyway.

UA informs that 44 of 49 seats in C have been booked! Sure, they will overbook C but one would expect the discounted buckets to drop lower when they only have 5 seats...... I was going to fly via FRA a few weeks ago and it was C9 D0. I would expect the same here.......

I suppose UA figures that they have 12 F seats to bump up C passengers since noone actually buys these seats. In a situation like this where Y is wide open but C is full: will they actually bump people up into F in order to accomodate WL upgrades to C class?? Probably not, I would guess.......

p.s. I noticed that the list price for a C booking class ticket is now over USD 9000! It's insane in comparison to the $445 that I can pay for a SWU upgradeable fare. For years and years it was always the magic number of USD 8314. Why not bump it up to, hmmmm, USD 10952. That's a nice round random number. It would increase revenue by 20% and solve UA's red ink flood! Yes!

Maybe UA should adopt benchmarks: entry level bicycle for W class and entry level Korean automobile for C class.