<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by dbaker:
Additionally, what would be the motivation to hold out seats on the day of departure? </font>
This is something CO needs to explain but my guess is that they do not want to lose any last minute revenue walk-ins, standbys, transfers from cancelled or delayed flights, etc., that have either paid FC or paid a higher fare in Y. They stand to lose more if high fare payers get frustrated without upgrades than low fare payers (the "riff-raff") do.
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I've seen A9F0 at 1am on a 6am departure. If the system is as sophisticated as you've indicated, it would certainly be capable of giving away a few seats to Platinum and Gold T/Qs to save them from having to get to the airport early to fight the silvers for seats.
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If you wanted to encourage everyone including Silvers to pay higher fares to get an upgrade, you wowuld reward Silver high fares with the upgrade over Plat and Gold "riff-raff".
The above is perfectly consistent with yield management. Would you rather lose business from people that historically pay low fares or lose business from those that pay high fares?
What is not clear is if this change is happening (there appears to be some anecdotal evidence for this), are they going to handle it by an explicit policy change or continue to market "smoke and mirrors" hoping that they will not lose either of the above two groups? I am not sure they anticipated the ITN use to monitor them.
