bocastephen

Let's assume for a moment that CO wants to fill BF with paying customers. Most of the people who buy BF (not all, but most) are business customers or high net worth individuals booking fairly close to the departure date, at least outside of the seasonal BF fare sales.

How about a compromise? What if we take a small subset of CO's premium customers - Gold and Platinum Elites - and create a rule where those customers who book Y or H fares at least 60 days before departure may waitlist for a upgrade to BF, and that list won't expire at 24hours, but be clearable at departure.

This way, CO continues encouraging those who *want* a confirmed BF seat to buy one, while permitting premium customers on leisure travel who book ahead and are willing to be confirmed in coach and stand by for BF, to get the benefit of the waitlist up to departure time. Theoretically, no BF seat will go unfilled and CO collects the extra revenue from selling H and Y fares to customers willing to take a chance at a last minute BF seat becoming available.

The only downfall I see is the chance that someone could make phantom reservations to hold seats and cancel at the last minute - but since you can no longer hold seats with a reservation indefinitely without paying for it, floating a bunch of 4-6K reservations on your credit card for a few months is probably more financial hassle than most people could tolerate.

The list could be cleared once the ticket sales cutoff is reached (which is well before 30 minutes), and could be cleared by revenue management (not the gate) in the order of status, ticket sales date and perhaps another tie-break measure such as EQMs earned for the year.