<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by venk:
[B] Oh wait, the airline is going bankrupt. There were two BC seats available for sale until the last 30 minutes. I got one as an upgrade when they realized they were not going to get a customer that late. The other seat remained empty. The airline did not lose any money by giving me the seat. B]</font>
Actually they've found that you DO lose money by "giving away" the BF product. Many of you will remember when the BF product was first introduced we had 2 BF cabins which amounted to 48 BF seats on the aircraft(DC-10). Also back then the UG policy was much more liberal. Well the fact of the matter was that with the vast number of seats and easy availablity for upgrade it was almost impossible to sell a full fare J class ticket. When we cut out the second BF cabin and limited the number of standard rewards we found that many people ARE willing to pay for the product.
Seems like most people on this board complain there are no seats available in international BF at "standard" reward levels but I and most reasonable folks don't consider BF to be a "standard" product either. There are always "EasyPass" seats available and considering that we do give you the miles for free in the first place it doesn't seem unreasonable to want to get some back in return.