PV_Premier

My takeaway from it is that AS managment has no sense of what they want their F product to be from an identity perspective. Right now it is 75K/MVPG class. Let's face it. 90% of the people in that cabin are upgraders, perhaps down to say 70% on some high demand corporate/government heavy routes.

I feel like they are trying to figure out ways to monetize the cabin more, but what they are actually doing is F'ing all that up, by constantly changing the product and making the experience inconsistent at best.

AS FAs are the top of the line among the US carriers, as a whole. Sure there are a few bad apples but not in the same frequency of AA/UA/DL. AS managment needs to step up and deliver a product that is worthy of the $$. I've bought a grand total of one AS F ticket in my life, and the only reason was that it was $20 more than coach at the time and the extra miles alone made that worth it. If F earned the same as Y, I would have just bought the coach and surely gotten the upgrade as usual.

Don't get me wrong, I love the upgrades, but I would rather see my upgrade rate at 50% than close to 75%, if the product was twice as good when I made it up there and AS was making good money off it.

dayone

The systemwide average number of paid F, including discount F, is about 6 seats.

n7371f

Amen. Hell if American can do it - the "best" airline in the industry can do it. But I will miss the flight attendant walking through the cabin offering hand outs of water like it's Aeroflot or something.

The real service discrep for AS with PDB is the usually less-rushed in-flight service once flight attendants get up means you can easily go over an hour from sitting down and getting anything to drink. When compared to the competition, it's a major fail.

n7371f

Sounds like the same crew I had last week on SEA-LAS. 2 hour flight time. Didn't get a drink until 50 minutes in, meal at 60, and had to ring flight call button for meal tray pick-up after they started their patented sit down early for LAS arrival. It was poorly done.

And add to it I was dumb enough to board at 40 mins early so I could sit there and watch flight attendants chat up front.

eponymous_coward

Not so much.

http://crankyflier.com/2011/08/11/al...ls-more-seats/

That was back in 2011 before AS was selling P class; it's not gotten better.

For funsies and for an additional anecdote in replacement of hard data, go look at how many F seats are available for sale 6/24 on SEA-LAS. Most of the flights are sold out. This is BEFORE the MVPG upgrade window (and it was this way last week before the 75K window too).

That'll happen soon enough once the 738s go from 16F to 12F as part of the Y+/F improvement process.

That's more like it.

jinglish

We were offered coffee, tea, and OJ in addition to the Dasani bottles on DTW-SEA today. Given that departure time was 7:00 AM, the lack of booze on offer seemed reasonable.

beckoa

I like my Coffee Irish