R/t or o/w? If r/t, I'd say that's a pretty decent offer depending on the fare paid. Note: not a GREAT deal considering the negligible MQM bonus, but as a frequent shuttle flyer, seems surprisingly low considering the route.

R/T.....but i was recently offered $50 each way on LGA-ORD-LGA which actually had a meal so $158 R/T for a much shorter flight does not seem like a good deal when everyone in coach gets free drinks anyway. It's literally 35 minutes of flying time.

Coming from Unitedland, I've been looking at Delta flights for certain places where United either doesn't serve, or doesn't serve with an efficient routing.

So, I've been looking... and this is what I see. Please explain what's going on here.

If I search for a flight from XXX-YYY, it will show me a price for a coach fare (U, L, K, etc), a Comfort+ (W) fare, and the First Class fare, an A fare, costs $300 more. But, if I select a coach fare, and select all the legs I want, it asks if I want to upgrade to First per person each way for $39 more. If I click this, both flights chosen now show an A fare.

Is this a "false" A fare, where all earnings will be for the original class, or is it some sort of -UP fare that books into A? In any case, if I selected this option, what will the earnings actually be?

Delta doesn't monkey around with the fare codes if you upgrade before check-in. Once you confirm a buy up, your fare becomes a regular FC fare, with all the same mileage earnings and SDC benefits. If you get an upgrade offer at check-in, often times the mileage earnings will be based on your originally purchased fare.

Ok, so there's no difference to selecting an A fare from the list of flights to choose from, and clicking the Upgrade button to turn the coach fares into A fares after I've selected my flights (but before the payment screen for the itinerary) besides the price (even though the "fee" to upgrade after selecting flights, but before booking is less than the fare difference on the first page)?

Yes, that's correct as per WWads. You can't expect these deep discount upgrades on most flights. For upgrade offers that occur *after* purchase, they can even be MORE expensive (or cheaper as you would expect) than just purchasing a first class fare outright to begin with. You have to be a smart consumer and know what you should be paying.

be careful ... sometimes (most??), that $39 teaser is followed by small font saying "per segment"

that said, however, the next screen (that displays the new price) also includes a "cancel upgrade" button

I too split my flights between DL and UA out of BOS, especially after AA has become such a dumpster fire post merger. Thanks for posting this because I just buy the cheap A/P fare straight out and didn't realize that the discounts were so significant; now I know I should do a Economy booking first to continue the tradition of being the least profitable passenger on the plane. :cool:

Interesting. I've definitely seen UA do this especially in instances when there is a connection from a main line flight to a regional. The $49 o/w upgrade is good only say from IAD to PIT, as opposed to BOS to IAD to PIT.

Isn't LGA-DCA-LGA a shuttle??? What does FC get you on the shuttle that Y does not? More room? Mixed drinks? I'm assuming beer and wine is still free in Y on the Delta Shuttle, I know it is on AA.

You don't even need to book in economy, just select the economy flights, and they'll try to upsell you (at a lower price than selecting the first fare on the previous screens) before you even get to the screen where you submit your info. I've noticed that this only occurs on select routes, and on other routes, the upsell is close to if not exactly the same as the fare difference.

Was offered $109 on check-in for LGA - RDU on a W/C+ fare.

Interesting offer since when I bought this ticket two days ago straight F was only $40 more than the W/C+ fare which itself was only $10 more than Y.

Declined both at booking and at check-in. Now if I get that offer on SLC - RDU next week maybe I'll bite.

So here's a tale of an FCM failure...

I'm making plans to attend a conference in February. My department will reimburse the travel costs, but I have to purchase a Y ticket and turn in the receipt. Yesterday, I bought my Y tickets for BWI-SLC-LAS and LAS-ATL-BWI. In the flight search results, F was listed as $150 more than Y for my chosen flights. I was fully planning to buy up as soon as I received a "clean" receipt for the Y purchase. I noted during check out that the buy-up offer was for $375, each way - so $750! I figure maybe it was a glitch, checked out, and got my email confirmation and receipt. I check the My Trips section, and the buy-up offer is still $375 each way. So I did another search for the flights - F prices jumped $600 in the 5 minutes from my initial search to time of purchase. Now I will watch the flight closely, and hopefully have a chance to buy-up for a more reasonable (to me) price.

Not that this is what happened to you, but I had a similar issue a few weeks ago. I was watching the F buy up rate for a trip I was taking. It was hovering around $150 for a while and I was tempted to buy it. A schedule change came along and suddenly the $150 price is up to $900!! It seems that one of the legs changed flight numbers to one shared by an international flight. So apparently the FCM algorithm was now treating the buy up as a transatlantic Delta One buy up (I could tell because as it had previously said "Upgrade to First Class" it now said "Upgrade to Business".)

It's a pretty big flaw in the system and stopped me from paying Delta $150 to upgrade.

Multi city trip. Offered at check-in for ONLY SLC-DFW and not ATL-SLC.. 159 dollars. No thanks.

Looks like I'll get that seat for free though :)

A possible explanation is that you bought the final seat in a Y inventory bucket that was tied to a Y-UP fare. Say you bought a T fare, and the inventory was T1 when you purchased...depleting the T bucket would also take away the T-UP fare, meaning your FCM would get bumped up to the next available UP fare class (if there is another one for that city pair).

Without looking at the fare structure in EF, we don't know what the explanation is though.