A skilled corporate travel agent should probably tell you to pound sand.

Paying additional for exactly the same product would likely be a breach of most companies travel and/or ethics policies (for the person making the request), and certainly outside of what most companies would expect as a part of a corporate travel contract.

Requesting a higher fare class is potentially a different story as there may be different conditions/benefits available when doing that (be that the ability to upgrade, better chance of SDC, or on some airlines even things like the ability to select seats/priority/boarding/etc), but in this case you'd be asking to purchase *exactly* the same product at a higher price to the company.

(OK, so technically fare conditions can vary within the same fare bucket class - but other than things like international BE that's rare, and not what is being suggested here)

I don't think anyone would spend the time to develop a feature that probably only five or six people in the world would care about.

I agree, but many passengers have done much worse, generally by delaying making travel plans until the tickets are more expensive. That said, I don't condone this approach for OPM travel, but it would be a nice option to have for personal travel, for those of us who find it necessary to stretch for PQD. The more fares I can access, the closer I can presumably come to hitting the target PQD dead on.

If it's personal travel, wouldn't it be better to just buy a higher fare class? It's hard to imagine many cases where there's a more expensive fare code in the same class that costs just enough but significantly less than the next higher fare class, which as mentioned above, could carry other advantages.

That scenario is actually quite common, depending upon where you are in the fare table. The next highest fare class might be $150-200 more, but the next highest fare within the current fare class might be $10 or $20 extra.

My expectation is that a lot more customization based on fares is on the way. Another recent topic in this subforum has already been hinting towards that. Booking/fare class as the sole discriminator of service and restrictions is absolutely a thing of the past.

See the remark above. I don't think a project like this wouldn't generate enough interest. I do believe, however, that it cannot be done without requiring significant surcharges and/or membership fees, especially if a 24/7 support desk and some guarantee against debit memos are required. So yes, that makes it DOA in today's day and age. Same reason why the consumer TA market has been reduced to a few consolidated players.

Note back in the day - before the internet went into "dumbing down" mode - you could actually register as your own personal travel agent through some of the bigger players and have access to a console ticketing interface. Tickets issued through that interface would bear the IATA number of the big player and they would just invoice you every month for what you purchased. There are still some topics about that dating from the early days of FT.