Voluntary Downgrade Question
 

A friend of mine is flying Business Class HKG-JNB on Cathay later this month on an award ticket (using AA miles). ITN shows that the flight is already totally sold out in Business. If Cathay needs her seat, she would be willing to downgrade (in order to sit with another friend who is in the Economy cabin) if they paid her the normal fare difference between the two classes. Is there any point in volunteering this when she checks in or is their corporate attitude in this situation strictly "Don't call us, we'll call you"? Thanks in advance for your replies.

Depends if your friend holds any OW status and if so at what level. Eg if she's OW Emerald, CX may consider it bad manners to approach her and ask her to downgrade.

CX frequently oversells its flights so it may not be an issue for your friend - think of all the Marco Polo Diamonds in J that they'll move to "a more comfortable seat"...

CX is amazingly accurate at predicting the load and often oversells but winds up at capacity except when special events skew the load. I've been on CX flights that were oversold by 40 with a full J and only 1 person was op-up'ed to F from J, leaving 6 empty F seats. I'd say the chances of needing a downgrade J to Y is close to zero even if the flight is showing J0 (most of the time J0 really means that Y is oversold and they want to keep the remaining J seats available for op-ups).

I agree, but this particular flight is still showing several seats available in Economy Class (Y, B, H and K to be specific), which is what made me think that J really is sold out. In addition, a few days ago the J bucket went from 0 to 1 and when I looked at the seat map there was actually only one seat open.
Also, within the last 2 weeks or so there was a report in this forum of passengers on this same flight who had been involuntarily downgraded (from First to Business, I believe), so it appears that downgrading does happen, even if only rarely.

Now let me get this straight...
if they paid her the normal fare difference between the two classes....???

She is on an award ticket!

She gets nothing if she downgrades voluntarily.

Having just flown HKG-JNB-HKG... it is a very long flight. Be content and stay in J. I mean.. is this all she can ever think about is money???

Same here, and I agree with GB. It's close to 13 hours, so why don't you ask your friend to get a F award?

Problem is there is no more F class on this route after 28th June.

According to the Cathay web site June 22 is the last date with F.