You seem to think that buying a seat in the PY cabin somehow makes you more valuable than someone who bought a seat in the Y cabin, but if you paid $1100 for PY A, why are you more valuable than someone who paid $1300 for Comfort M?
Well that's not really the decision I'm facing as the customer... I'm not going to just voluntarily pay a higher fare than what they're asking for the same flight and terms. I guess the part of the point would be if the person who paid a last-minute M fare of $1300 is worth more to AC then AC should be putting them in the big seat. From the consumer's point of view the eupgrade from PY is unambiguously worth less than the eupgrade from Latitude but it costs more which is just not a good sales pitch.
There are quirks in AC's pricing where the relationship might break down somewhat (thinking primarily of the cheap ex-Europe Latitude fares here), but in general, AC's goal is clearly to make it cheaper for people to upgrade if they've bought more expensive fares.
Well yes that's relevant to me. But even if I just search a straight up plain old return YUL-DUB on a random date I consistently see Premium Economy Lowest at approximately the same price as Latitude. $1700 for PY, $1800-$1850 for Latitude. Significantly more than "Flex" at ~$1200. (There doesn't seem to be Comfort offered at all.) Sure if this was the last minute and only M was available I would be a more valuable customer to AC but I'm not and that's not on the menu so it's not relevant to my purchasing decision.
I disagree entirely. I think they understand very well how much extra money people spend on buying higher Y fares to improve their J upgrade chances, and that's why the eUp chart is the way it is.
That's more or less true up to the PY fares. At that point it just seems to break down imho. It's like they added PY as an afterthought. It's just a bad product positioning to have a PY product that costs nearly as much as latitude but is worse for frequent fliers than economy fares. I mean... you can't possibly justify the eupgrade costs being *exactly* the same for Latitude and PY *flexible* can you? BA used to charge *half* the avios for a PY upgrade as an economy upgrade -- they inflated that but it's still significantly less than a full economy to business upgrade. AC is basically telling us here that they think PY is worthless.