canadiancow

Last night, a flight for today was J5R1.

A friend confirmed an upgrade, bringing it to J4 R0.

Two of was figured we'd book full J this morning if we woke up on time.

We woke up and it was J1 R1.
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It remained that way until departure, where they cleared one gate upgrade for a total of about 7 upgrades.

I was obviously not able to book J2.

RM is probably thinking "we had to do a gate upgrade, so we had no chance of selling J".

Whereas if they hadn't upgraded so many people, I would have booked two last minute full J seats.

So how do they ever reconcile this? How would they determine that they could have made more money by not upgrading people ahead of time?

KenHamer

Probably easier for them to know when they don't screw up given the rarity of it.

jjclancy

Your evidence that RM screwed up in this case is not persuasive.

tracon

Unless two full J seats are sold every morning on this route, RM did nothing wrong.
Unless you phoned RM the night before and said we might buy two J seats in the morning, RM did nothing wrong.
The computer did what the historical algorithms told it to do.

The alternative would have been a thread about battleground upgrades when the flight was J9R0.

canadiancow

7 upgrades given out such that I couldn't buy full J? I think that's pretty persuasive.

But regardless, the overall question remains, independent of this example. How do they know when they've screwed up?

This is not the first time I've seen a flight wide open in Y with tons of cleared upgrades, but I couldn't buy J because they'd "cheapened the cabin" (to use their own words).

I have no way of signaling that I wanted to buy two seats, so they have no idea they left money on the table.

canadiancow

But that's exactly my point. Historical algorithms said they wouldn't sell 2 J day of departure, so they upgraded such that it was impossible to sell 2 J.

And now we see again that they didn't sell 2 J day of departure.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you fill the cabin with upgrades because you don't sell last-minute J, then you can't sell last-minute J. And since they don't sell last-minute J, they might as well fill the cabin with upgrades, right?

There's no feedback in this loop.

eigenvector

Isn't the way of signaling that you might want to fly full J on a certain flight to buy a full J ticket?

After all, you could always cancel it for a full refund if you want to.

jc94

pitz

delete

jjclancy

What was the full J fare on that route? What was the equipment?

Bohemian1

Since I was on it (and was one of the many e-ups) I can tell you it was a 321. Dunno about the fare though.

RangerNS

The question is more clearly stated as:

If it is mechanically impossible to sell something, is it possible to accurately detect demand for that thing when the availability of that thing is reasonably available and one-off negotiations are neigh impossible?

Logically, that is impossible.

How many pairs of J tickets do they sell at T-24? How many trips, how many quads?

I would assume they do the occasional A/B testing, holding back eUp clearing until the last minute and seeing what the open market holds. There is some schedule for clearing eUps which is more complex then "at the gate". "At the gate" would leave the opportunity for more sales, but apparently sooner than that has some value to AC. (honestly, as someone who eUps to much personal comfort, I'm not sure I'd do anything different if upgrades took until check-in cut off time to process). That must be an open question and one of at least ongoing water cooler debate, I'm sure. Some informal A/B testing would not take that much effort - only the interest and will of shared senior management of the eUp and RM groups.

Jagboi

I though the long complaint on this board was R0 when J<1. "The R Games" wasn't a long running thread for nothing. This has to be the first time I have heard AC being criticized for being too generous with making R space available.

bawm

This is not true at all. Full J always allows wait listing, which is just one of the ways you can signal to RM that you want a seat.

bawm

ffsim