cmtlatitudes

Yesterday I booked holiday season flights. This was only the Caribbean but half the F seats were already taken. And even though it's still far enough out the prices will usually come down later in the year ---- once all the people who simply won't fly if they're not upfront have secured their seats and there's a booking lull --- I don't see it happening this year. Not unless something changes drastically anyway. It wasn't a hard decision to pay for F now.

I see more and more folks just paying for F, rather than taking their chances. If they can't afford F many are putting off the trip until they can. The back of the plane is abysmal right now.

ceebee100

I agree with you, lots of folks seem to be buying up front lately. I was looking at flights to the Caribbean at the end of April and F/J was almost full already! Rather than play Upgrade Roulette, I outright purchased up front as the price differential was about $200. I figured it was worth $200 to be up front for 4 pretty long segments.

EXPLAT

Yes, that’s correct.

FYI: #1 on the upgrade list got a J seat when the original person didn’t show up for the flight. By then I was #3 on the upgrade list. #2 on the upgrade list got the PE seat next to me. So with 100k loyalty points thus far, that isn’t enough to top the list.

The 787-9 was completely full.

EXPLAT

That is true. I would have done that had it been $200, but the buy up was $2,400 which is higher than typical. That should have clued me in to the demand was higher than normal.

js1993

Hope you enjoy the flight, your trip, and EXP status. But as for the latter, you're going to become miserable very quickly if you spend even a fraction of this amount of time worrying about upgrades. This was true pre-Covid and it's far more true now. Best to book a seat you can tolerate and then hope for the best.

VegasGambler

You should always book a seat you can tolerate but unless you are based in a major hub upgrades should be pretty common. Not 100% but there are lots of people here who report 90%+ upgrade rates.

EXPLAT

Short overnight flight so reclined the seat at takeoff, put up the leg rest, and didn’t wake up until landing. The eye mask from another HNL-DFW flight came in handy. Woke up when it was time to put the seat up. Slept like a baby.

I’m researching this and gathering expert opinions from fellow FT’s as I have the same weekly flights scheduled until the end of May. Then monthly again. So not a one of experiment.

EXPLAT

I typically book coach to Hawaii and PE to the mainland. When F can be had for say $350 more than PE, I buy F. But sometimes F can be many multiples of that.

EXPLAT

Upcoming trip EXP w/125k LP’s DFW-OGG 10-seats open, 4 upgraded at t-100, excluding myself. EF shows C6, was C7. Not having much luck on Hawaii flights lately. I say they were upgraded because the four scattered travelers all moved to row 1. They would have picked those seats to begin with, had they been purchased tickets.

Connections to DFW upgraded for the two of us.

js1993

By that logic, why hadn't others up there selected them already?

FlyingEgghead

I think what EXPLAT means is that the 4 who were upgraded weren't in the same party, because if they were, they would have chosen adjacent seats in Y or PE. Rather, they were just auto-assigned consecutive seats in F.

EXPLAT

They could have been in the same party but when upgraded, the system just randomly assigns seats. When the wife and I get upgraded, the seats most of the time are not together and I have to go in after the fact to select side by side seats, if available. I believe this is what happened in the above scenario, meaning that these were not last minute purchased F tickets.

iplaybass

Count me in that category. I was looking at SXM next January, overnight in CLT to avoid the MCT transfer, and SXM the next day. Figuring I'd wait for J fares to drop, I didn’t book on March 10. March 11, our desired itinerary was gone, at least at a reasonable price. But Y is so painfully uncomfortable these days (bad knees and back), it's worth the extra $$$ to buy J outright, and I know I'm not the only one.

FlyingEgghead

Okay, it was pretty unclear but I think I finally understand. You were watching the seats so closely that you saw the upgraded pax initially scattered in F, then saw them move to adjacent seats.

I had thought by "scattered" you meant the previous seats in Y or PE that opened up when the upgrades occurred (which you had somehow tracked with seat maps or alerts). And so I thought you were arguing that they weren't in the same party, and hence that moving to F had to be an auto-upgrade because 4 unrelated people wouldn't have purchased an upfare to F simultaneously.

Part of my reason for interpreting it this way is that in my experience, auto-upgrades do not assign seats "randomly". Rather they seem to follow an order among available seats in the cabin (often back to front, it seems). So while auto-assignment to row 1 isn't necessarily what I'd expect, it wouldn't surprise me if unrelated people upgraded simultaneously end up together, when there are many open seats. However, it's now clear that this isn't what happened in the case you observed.

FlyingEgghead

After further clarification of what EXPLAT meant, the answer is: Apparently no one previously in F had specifically wanted those seats, but these 4 pax did. The intended meaning wasn't that anyone in F would obviously prefer row 1; it was that (per EXPLAT's observations) the 4 upgraded pax near-simultaneously changed their seats from their "scattered" initial assignments in F, which is enough to conclude that those initial assignments were not chosen deliberately by those pax (why deliberately choose scattered seats only then to promptly change to adjacent ones?). In other words, it's the fact that the pax had to actively change their seats, not the fact that they changed to any particular row. This is how EXPLAT concluded that the F seats resulted from system-generated assignments in an auto-upgrade.