silverforumsurf

It seems by Day of Departure United does way too many ToD and CPUs of first class seats on domestic flights (often leaving zero); which then doesn't give them room to handle IRROPS of paid first class passenger, not to mention super difficult to buy a last minute First fare or for paid first class passengers to catch an earlier / later flight.

Other airlines like Air Canada are way better at holding back a couple first seats to accomodate last minute purchases or IRROPs and then processing upgrades of any remainder. The negative NPS of an involuntary downgrade must outweigh upgrading a premier 24 hours earlier. Or selling full fare first > kiosk upgrade revenue

Often1

UA generally holds 2 F seats for the gate.

There is an argument that carriers ought to disfavor at least freebie UG's until the gate, but that will only come as all three of the legacies edge away from those UG's in the first place.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure that there is really that much paid F, as opposed to discounted fares.

MY-OTHER-BROTHER-"TED"

So that's why I can never buy a last minute F/C ticket on United!

I agree with Often1, as I also noticed that they normally hold back at least 2 seats up-front until the door shuts.

mduell

I have not seen that practice this year.

cjermain

It doesn't seem to me like there are last-second seats available up front very often. Sure, UA might wait until the last second to process battlefield upgrades into the last two empty seats, if there are any empty seats. But all of the seats up front seem to be gone hours before most flights leave, especially domestic. I don't think that UA has any problem selling time-of-check-in upgrades into the last F seat on a domestic flight, for example.

findark

I was able to get an in-depth look at this on a route with no TODs (rather, no one bought them). Note this is sample size n=1 route and not applicable to other routes, but I suspect they are similar..

UA wouldn't CPU the last two seats on the plane. But within 24 hours, inventory was F2 P2 R0, which strongly implies to me that they were offering the $199 (fare differential) upsell, which in this rare instance no one took. What I would like to see is F2 A0 (I think this means no TOD prints) up to the gate, holding the seats for people who are willing to pay full F, or for F IRROPS.


If you need to get rebooked in paid F, you are up a creek and it's absolutely infuriating.

Hipplewm

When I lost my seat on last flight of the day SFO-YVR, the next day 4 flights, all 100% full up front. I didn't look at upgrades or anything, cause I honestly don't care, but to say they save 2 seats is pretty wild. My flights this year have seen very very few battlefield upgrades....

EmailKid

Guess it varies, but on flights that I've seen, there were one or two seats at T60 min. Caveat - I don't do transcons or flights up and down the west coast. Let alone east coast.

Vulcan

In my recent experience, UA will take the bird in hand (2 x199 as a Kiosk sell or check in sell) rather than risk having to give the seats away as a CPU. This is an accounting decision and indicates that they don't care about F IRROPS. I am on a 752 TPA>EWR about a week from now and all FC seats have been gone for over a week already. They just want to sell them. I bought one (P) when 12 of the 16 were already sold. Money is all that matters.

silverforumsurf

On west coast most of time there is zero F on morning of departure. It's infuriating that you're just totally out of luck if United delay created a misconnect for global paid polaris pass (often $10k fares vs the silly $200 upgrade) down gauge or any number of things that would be solved if thy held off from by selling / confirming 8+ Cheap/free upgrades..

And for the rare no-shows, they usually wrongly add you to waitlist as a CPU vs paid first and very difficult to have them update the list over phone! (The gate agent needs to manually confirm and if they're nice prioritize over the cpus).

In The 216

Think about what some of you are saying....

You're saying that the airline should withhold one or two first class seats until T-1 (or T-2, T-3, T-4, whatever) so that those that are in the first class cabin on a paid first class fare can have options when IRROPS occurs or you chose to SDC? While I understand that desire, it just simply doesn't make business sense. If the airline can sell TOD's or otherwise sell those seats, why should't they? United is not losing paying F customers by a greater revenue dollar amount than they are selling TOD's because of how revenue management is allocating seats.

jsloan

Because CPUing someone ahead of time, or selling an upgrade at checkin for $99, could cause a negative experience for someone who spent $10K on a ticket. Having a couple of seats available in case of minor IRROPS -- misconnects that only affect a passenger or two -- seems like good long-term business sense.

They can process the CPUs at T-1 just as easily as they can at T-24. And they can still sell the TODs; I just think they should interrupt the sale until, say, T-1 if they hit a cap.

And I say this as somebody that is much more likely to be on a CPU than a P fare. :-)

In The 216

My point is that I think the scenario that you describe is grossly overstated/exaggerated.

jsloan

Sure, but it takes an awful lot of $99 TODs to make up for a lost $10K customer. And, again, I'm not really suggesting that they stop selling / processing the upgrades, just that they delay them a bit.

Besides -- even if it's rare, airlines do sell walk-up F fares occasionally. And on a lot of routes, they could TOD half the front cabin and still make less than the one unrestricted F ticket that another airline is getting because UA is full.

findark

Hard to say. I feel like for a lot of flights it can be done in a more revenue neutral way: clear 2 fewer advance upgrades in order to hold seats to the gate. While there are flights which go out with fewer than 2 cleared upgrades, they're relatively uncommon. And if refusing to sell the last two seats to TODs meant better elite upgrade percentages, would that really hurt the business? Hard to tell..

I don't think same-day reaccommodation is an unreasonable ask from paid F. Fortunately, I have the benefit of originating in SFO, so the vast majority of my travel is nonstop (which is why I choose UA, ironically) and I don't need to worry about this issue much. If I lived in a smaller city where every trip required a hub connection, I would absolutely take my business and my loyalty elsewhere if there were another airline that actually had seats day-of.

When I was flying SFO/WAS weekly, it was standard for the next available nonstop seat in F to be more than 24 hours away. This on a route with something like 8-10 daily nonstops.