Is buying economy & looking for upsell better than buying cheapest F/J? or Upfaring?
 

The last few revenue tickets that I bought in coach, the immediate upsell offer was always a lot better than buying Biz outright.

If Biz is not required but would be welcomed, is it always better to buy coach and look for the offer?

Depends. If the upsell offer immediately following a purchase is less than the difference between the coach fare you paid and the lowest F fare at the time, chances are it's not a re-fare and will book into some form of upgrade inventory that does not earn additional RDM/PQM/PQD

thanks for your reply.
I am an infrequent revenue traveler, so really have no need for PQM or PQD. The RDM bonus is not a huge thing for me either, as most of these are short-haul.

For an upcoming early morning p.s. flight EWR SFO (where I could use a bed but coach wouldn't be a disaster), biz fares all had a comma, but coach this direction was $119. The upsell was $299, for a $418 total well below the $600-700 I've been willing to pay, so I took it.

I booked into P class. However, the rules were quite clear that the $299 was a nonrefundable fee I'd paid for this specific flight, that would be lost for any voluntary change of flight. For example, it is hard enough to make a free same-day change on a legitimate P fare (online software dumps you in coach), and after reading these rules, I'm deducing that this is simply not an option. One has to call or make "P" fare changes in person, so if I had to I'd try, but I'm not expecting anything.

I'm receiving double PQM's (5,130 not 2,565) but no PQD's (still $97 as before the upgrade) for this $299. I've been bottlenecking on PQD's not PQM's to reach 1K, but last year for example I earned two extra RPU's by incidentally reaching 125k PQM's. So the PQM's aren't worthless.

For my next purchase the upsell was $449, on a day flight where I couldn't justify paying for the bed, so I passed. I'm learning not to be judgmental about how I spend my travel budget (last year, buying first more often, difficulty using upgrade certs, but a much better front-of-plane percentage). Considering upsells is simply a new aspect of strategy.

To make a comparison, there was a stealth group at Google applying deep learning to their Google Translate software. (It's all one form or another of machine learning; this was a beta alternative version of the code.) They quietly swapped it in one day, and people everywhere noticed that translations had suddenly gotten better.

Aspects of United's software appears barely able to fog a mirror, but I presume that their best talent works on pricing. At various stages of the past and future, advances in machine learning have and will appear. We should assume that we are interacting with an artificial organism paying rapt attention to our individual behavior, trying very hard to game us. Be very consistent in the training we provide back to this organism, like training a puppy, and we may see better offers.

That hasn't been my recent experience, at least where domestic is concerned. While I haven't captured any hard numbers I can share, I've seen some buy-up offers that significantly exceeded the outright purchase pricing (which I've always thought odd given the ease of the 24-hr refund).

Of course the training works both ways, and we are seeing different behavior in FTers who fly United, too. ;)

Short answer, based on my experiences, the answer is no. The offer at the end of purchasing is not always the best and the offers post-purchase are also not always better than purchasing outright. Sometimes yes, sometimes no is the actual answer. i have since many cases of both and you have the 24 hour cancel free rule to protect you.

On the p.s. routes, if there is not discount P at booking, I have had luck the past couple of times getting offers of $299-$319 at OLCI. I did get an offer of $299 to upgrade SAN-EWR at booking, which was also a far better deal than buying F at the available fares outright. That got me extra PQM but no extra PQD.

Definitely a mixed bag, but I really would only consider buying up for TCON/near-TCON flights. Otherwise it would have to be a dirt-cheap offer, and that would probably upset me more (as it means I wasn't getting CPU'ed).

This I feel is incorrect. I just came back from my mileagerun from EWR to SFO and was presented with the same opportunity to upgrade to First for $299 at check-in, 24 hours before departure. Everything I read on this site and everything that I got told by the Premier Services desk was that your fare class will NOT change. In fact your PQM's will be the same as your original fare. So either you did circumvent this, if so, how? Or you will be pissed when you see what posts to your account to find out that you spent more CPM than you thought based on the PQM bonus.

The answer is that it is almost always cheaper to fish for the upsell offer. The amount of the offer is pegged to the route fare differential, and is frequently equal to or slightly less than it. The difference from Y to F at original booking is always equal to or greater than this value, and so it is usually (but not always) cheaper to buy the upsell.

Also note, you can always fish for the upsell offer and cancel your ticket if you don't like the offer.

The upsell can have tremendous value in a few cases:
- you can purchase a double upgrade on 3-cabin routes
- on non differentially fared routes (p.s.) the difference between lowest Y and lowest J can be extreme, but the upsell is still pegged at $299
- on normal domestic routes, the upsell pulls from A space but the differential fare might have been into P, which is unavailable.

The downsides of the upsell are:
- you will not earn PQD nor RDM on the additional fee
- you sometimes do not earn extra PQM based on the premium cabin (but usually do)
- the upsell is a collected fee, and is forfeit in the case of voluntary changes to your itinerary


If you are careful about hunting for good First fares, you generally don't want to use the upsell because it will be within $30 of the First fare outright, and the security and extra PQD/RDM are more than worth the potential ~$30 savings. But there are some cases where it can be very beneficial to fish for the offer.

This is half true. The upgrade fare books into an appropriate premium cabin fare bucket, usually P. You will absolutely earn PQM based on the P fare but do not earn additional PQD on the upgrade fee.

See above. You absolutely book into the premium cabin fare bucket.

The issue of if PQM bonuses and PQDs are earning on cash upgrades is extensively covered in http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...ome-don-t.html.

The thread's wiki has a summary

Its a gamble.

All over the map in my experience - sometimes the upsell is cheaper, sometimes the upsell is more expensive, other times no upsell offered.

Not always. I have bit on many upgrade offers that book into R and still use my coach fare basis for earnings. I have also bit on some that were re-fares and changed the booking class to P or some other revenue fare and sometimes even the fare basis.