Originally Posted by
FL370
I get clearing out J in order to open up Y space, but I’m seeing J0, Y9 often 24 hours out. What harm is caused to upgrades doing it 4 hours before the flight to accommodate J sales or J customers that need to change flights due to irrops or their personal schedule changes? I’d argue this behavior is causing AS to lose significant money on the table.
Oh, you're assuming the AS upgrade processor works well enough that they can do things like that. No, not so much. The cost of fixing it is again, something endemic to an LCC where "no, it's not worh the cash to get past our ancient, stone knives and bearskins SABRE implementation" is put down the beancounter priority list behind other stuff.
Also, again, I think you overestimate last minute F demand in AS's primary hub, SEA, which tends to be how they orient their operations.
SFO is not their primary hub, and their markets out of SFO are more oriented towards leisure (read: not many people are deciding they need to change to the HNL, PSP or PVR flight 4 hours later the same way UA customers are deciding on ORD/EWR/DEN).
Originally Posted by
TalkingPoint
It annoys me that they do this as well. You don’t even need to fill up J to open space in Y. Just allow Y to oversell up to as many seats as you have unsold in J and then have the gate process upgrades instead of rely on the faulty professor.
Right, because gate agents aren't doing other things and risking D0 problems (on time departure) isn't a big deal to an LCC where D0 gets prioritized over making sure that you can sell last minute F.
By all means feel free to send in those cards and letters to AS management and vote with your dollars but none of this is remotely new.
Frankly, I
do think AS is a bad choice as a primary airline for someone who flies paid F out of SFO, highly values maximum flexibility with their plans and swiveling on a dime (read: you need maximum frequency, which you won't get unless you're flying to SEA/PDX), and thus needs an IROPS free experience. UA is the better choice as the dominant carrier out of SFO (AS routinely gets hosed by ATC holds and then things like this happen:
SFO Flight Moved to SJC). I don't think they're likely to fix things that have been going on for decades.