Originally Posted by
haapalainen
I also get the frustration of not clearing every upgrade request. I've said it before but IMO there are just too many vouchers and too many Avios to be used. We are talking tens of thousands of long haul upgrade vouchers every year plus all the billions of Avios in circulation.
Finnair guarantees a minimum of 2 business awards for every flight but for example for the end of this year they have pretty much all already been taken for long haul flights. There is so much demand. Every flight is J9 but if you don't restrict award space soon you have nothing to sell closer to departure. And that's not a very good business decision either.
And don't get me wrong, I hate the waitlists. Trying to plan a holiday to SIN for next November there is not a single day with U1. But I honestly don't know what would be a better solution. J0 months before a flight is not good for the customer either.
I am sure once the avios universe starts to do arbitrage redeeming on AY the demand will be huge. Just like all premium awards was hooverd from QR.
I am not entirely convinced the upgrade demand from vouchers is huge right now though. Sure, they artificillay created pent up demand by removing availability for a long time. But is there a reason to think there are so much more vouchers in play in this era, compared to say pre 2021?
When it comes to demand, we don't have any hard numbers. Looking at annual reports, the number I can find is that the program now (2023) encompasses "
around 4,5M members", with "
around 4M members" 2022 and "
over 3,5M members" 2021. This looks like a huge growth, but I can't find number from earlier years and it doesn't say much about number of golds/platinums/lumos and number of vouchers in play.
Numbers of members will always increase (very few people will ever cancel their membership). And with the current shift away from business travel, I'm guessing there is no organic growth in numbers of high tier members (promos of course added top tiers temporarily).
Trying to guess demand by observing supply is difficult because the paradigm shift in how they release avilability. If they used to release 6 seats on a certain route and you earlier saw U/3 that is actually a higher demand than today seeing U/0 or U/1 on basically every departure on every date.
A tell tale from the "impossible" SIN route. I booked and upgraded 6-7 months out as soon as the 2 guaranteed seats were released. A lumo on the same flight was put on waitlist and kept there for 6 months. Around a week or two before departure, 5 seats were released to U but the lumo was kept on waitlist. At the airport a few hours before take-off, they were still accepting voucher upgrades to business cabin.
We've seen others reporting this behaviour too - a lot of U seats getting released close to departure. To me that kind of indicates the risk of J/0 a month before departure is very low. There doesn't seem to be that kind of demand, neither for paid J nor reward/upgraded J. I think they could very well use their world class revenue management to early on predict demand and subsequenbtly relase more U early on. If they end up releasing 2+5 seats anyway, why not release 4 seats upfront and keep the last 3 seats likely to be empty for late waitlist-clearnance? But they chose not to, for some reason not known outside AY.