As 810 says, the CC racket is a side business, not the main business and the airline business is no different than being in the Dairy business. Fresh milk is a very perishable commodity, the dairy/dairy farmer produces milk and needs to "move" that milk before it expires, otherwise it is worthless, much the same as airlines main business is to sell tickets before the plane takes off as they are worthless afterwards. The dairy farmer can try and control his herd seasonally or whatever, but ultimately the diary must sell it on to turn into cheese or whatever to try and increase the shelf life/expiration date and even increase the value of the milk. The airline can find ways to avoid spoilage by making incremental revenue by turning unsold inventory into something of some value before the plane leaves. Frequent flyer programs essentially became a way to avoid spoilage of unsold seats. If an airline has an overall 82% load factor, that means that ultimately 18% of seats are UNSOLD. No program, with the possible exception of the very top top tiers, and often at additional cost, makes FF seats available when they do not have to, and you may find in most cases that far out from your desired date there is little or no availability for ones desired date and destination, and when one moves very close to a date more inventory MIGHT open up. This does not make redeeming and transferring and converting, especially as a one off, very attractive or indeed often possible for the CC scenarios that you outline above. Furthermore, judging from every other airline that has gone to a PE setup, it will require a greater amount of miles of $ to upgrade from Y to J , as the intermediate step would either require much more miles or even the purchase of PE to be able to upgrade to J. That is the case every single time. Furthermore if there were to be a reduction in the number of J seats this would mean that there would be fewer opportunities to upgrade, full stop, answering,,,,,,,,"well you can always upgrade on the day of travel" is ridiculous as 1) There will be less seats overall to upgrade to, and 2) Who says that this will always be the case, there are plenty of airlines out there that do NOT allow mile upgrades on the day of travel.