Is there any rhyme or reason to when these get offered?

- This Sunday I'm flying ATL-RDU, buy up offered for $119
- Two Saturdays from now I'm flying RDU-ATL-BWI, no buy up is currently offered

Loads are much higher on the Sunday flight.

I thought they were always offered as long as first class seats were available and it is a domestic flight.

The prices on my flights I am seeing are absurd. They seem a lot higher than what the FCM price was that I was offered at the time of booking.

For a short ATL/RDU, I wouldn't even think of paying that. There won't be a meal service and you have one free drink with the HOOU anyway if you don't get upgraded.

I looked at an upcoming MSP/LAS and when I booked the FCM fare was a little over $300 and now the buyup price is $895. I usually get upgraded on that flight anyway and if I don't I have EC each way and $895 will (or even $300) could be better spent in Vegas than for a few hours up front

Well the buyup is going to be the difference between whatever you booked at the current going first class fare. Generally that means as you get closer to the flight, the price is going to go up unless the plane isn't full and they try to dump seats to reduce losses.

Delta is not offering me (yet) a buy up price for my December JFK-LAS-ATL itinerary but it is willing to put me in EC for only $9 per segment.

I passed on that generous offer because I am Gold and already have free EC seats.

Exactly. G might have been available before, but the closer you get to departure, you'll end up with higher fares like P, hence the $800 difference instead of $300.

Do the buy-ups exist for just the return flight?

Say you had MSP-LAS-MSP booked, get to LAS and have a run of good luck, and want to UG the return.

If so, that LAS return market could make a killing with these things.

I'm sure it is due to a lower fare bucket being available at the time of booking. But if I was going to pay to upgrade to FC, I would have done it at the time of booking where I could use miles.

I could see this being useful for business travelers who want to use their own money to upgrade and would rather do it online instead of calling Delta. They book the ticket online using their corporate credit card (or book it and get the email with the coach ticket price being charged to their credit card for reimbursement purposes) and then going online and upgrading to using their own credit cards.

To your point about business travelers, it also seems to allow upfaring without a change fee which makes it more convenient to do it online rather than calling and playing agent roulette.

I didn't think there was a charge if you were buying up to first class as long as it was on the same flights. Is this a new policy that they charge a change fee to upfair (I haven't done it in about 2 months)?

In the past whenever I have called the diamond desk they have never charged me to upgrade to first class as long as I am on the same originally booked fares. I have also been on LUT fares in the past and wanted to use the old SWU's and have been able to get the fare class changed to just the difference in fare so I could use the SWU with no change fee.

I've never tried it, but from reports I've read on this forum some agents tried to charge a change fee. It makes sense that no fee should be charged since you aren't actually making a change, but from what I read it was a YMMV situation with agents.

I've had 0% success getting a change fee waived to buy up. It's been about a year since I've tried, because back then I didn't know that HUCA could be effective, and I gave up after four or five attempts to upgrade various different trips either over the phone or through delta assist. Maybe it was because I was an FO, maybe I just had bad luck, or maybe it was both. But anecdotal evidence suggests to me that it really just depends on who you talk to, but if you're PM/DM you have much greater chances of success (both because of status and because of the call centers you get to speak with). I've never tried to do it as a GM, because I've either purchased reasonable G fares, had itineraries that were very short and didn't care about the UG, I was confident I would get upgraded on most or all segments, or I bought a cheap far in advance and the buy-up was way out of my range (at time of ticketing and closer in). I accepted the fact that UGs were rare even before I reached FO, and after my first few upgrades, I was over the whole "sitting in first" thing; it's nice to get every once in a while, but I'm much more content with getting a good EC seat for free and just getting to where I need to go reliably.

On a recent flight from MSP to BNA I had a FC award ticket on an EJ 175. There was no PDB although the flight was boarding on time. The FA just stood up in the galley the entire time. Once the flight hit the 10k mark, the FC FA spent 15 minutes helping the coach FA prepare her cart. Once that was past, well over an hour since boarding, the FC FA had her first interaction with the FC passengers. A single pass for drink requests followed by a single pass of the snack basket. As we got closer to BNA my beverage had been empty for 15 minutes and it was apparent that there would be no more service so I had to press the call button to get a second beverage (which was answered by the coach FA) while all of the other FC passengers sat with empty glasses. I kept asking myself why anyone would pay extra money for this?

Granted, I've had far superior service but if Delta hopes to pull off this move to FCM you'd think they would ensure the service was a little more consistent?

I recently completed a buy-up transaction (employer would only allow economy ticket to be booked) and the agent said "give me one second- we all just got a new e-mail about this. The change fee is supposed to be waived for DM/PMs who buy up to a higher class of service." She put me on hold for two minutes then came back and confirmed that information from her e-mail.

Negative FCM
 

So, I'm booking a one-way to EWR and as usual the one-ways are more expensive and the SLUT fares aren't offered. This time, an H fare is offered for 381.00 and an A fare is offered for 378.50. Both the H and A fares are non-refundable. So for $2.50 less, I can book a confirmed first class seat versus waiting for the possible upgrade. Negative FCM!

So many folks complain about DL's IT, but your experience is a good example of the great things it can do for DL's customers.