Business class happy hour [expired August 2012]

[Standby]

May be they are doing this as safe guard against the scenario where people get upgraded at lounge and then downgraded at gate?

I've been told its a limitation of the Sabre booking engine full stop. It can only display a certain number of fare buckets on 1 screen so J cabin drops out. It's very shortsighted
as customers dont readily get to see that sometimes the extra to travel J can be resonable trade up. Oh well they must know more about customer buying behaviour than anyone here.

 

[oz_mark]

An excellent example of the reservation system/IT side of things destroying the businesses ability to earn revenue. Exactly the opposite of what should happen!

Err, Virgin just went out and bought a product that presumably met their stated needs. Perhaps it is an excellent example of the business buying the wrong product!

 

[Mak404matt]

I've been told its a limitation of the Sabre booking engine full stop. It can only display a certain number of fare buckets on 1 screen so J cabin drops out.

VX use Sabre and they display all fares on the one page, so I doubt that would be the case. In fact I think VX shows 6 buckets on the one page (ie Discount Econ, Full Econ, Instant Upgrade MCS, Full MCS and a couple of First fares)

 

[eastwest101]

VX use Sabre and they display all fares on the one page, so I doubt that would be the case. In fact I think VX shows 6 buckets on the one page (ie Discount Econ, Full Econ, Instant Upgrade MCS, Full MCS and a couple of First fares)

That would seem to confirm my theory that there is nothing wrong with Sabre per se - its the integration/execution of Sabre that we see on the VA web site that could be the source of a lot of limitations/problems.

 

[LiamR]

As a bit of an aside, I noticed recently that they don't oversell the Y cabin on domestic flights.

I was in Newcastle with others in the week before the F1 GP and on the Friday every single Y seat to Melbourne was booked out on both VA and JQ. I had a colleague who decided to train it to SYD and pay a fair bit to fly from there.

When I turned up at the airport I thought I'd be a great chance for an opup as the flight was fully booked but when I got on board I realised that there were only 2/8 seats taken in J.

What i learned:

1. The new sabre booking system shows the flight as sold out if you search for a Y seat. It doesn't even try to sell you a J one - I suspect my colleague may have stumped for it if the option was presented.

2. VA are not overselling Y. They probably could quite easily have offered Y seats on the route for 4 or 500 bucks one way and sold them and bumped a few passengers up but instead they basically stopped selling tix to 98% of people who searched their site.

Seem poor yield management to me.

My experience in the MEL Lounge on Wednesday (Trying to get changed from a flight to OOL, instead of BNE) was that Economy was oversold by about 3 seats on each flight. So perhaps it depends on the route?

 

[777]

My experience in the MEL Lounge on Wednesday (Trying to get changed from a flight to OOL, instead of BNE) was that Economy was oversold by about 3 seats on each flight. So perhaps it depends on the route?

May well be. May also be a transitional glitch or a bunch of business passengers cancelled at the last minute on my flight?

 

[JohnK]

OOL-SYD is my most common flight, normally at peak times (fri afternoon & Monday morning) and J is always full. (Sometimes with spare Y Seats). I can never use fly ahead.

Interesting that we have not been on any flights together. I have been departing on the 6:05pm Friday afternoon flight OOL-SYD and the most I have seen in business is 1 person except when I used my complimentary upgrade and there were 2 people in business.

 

[bullerdude]

I've been told its a limitation of the Sabre booking engine full stop. It can only display a certain number of fare buckets on 1 screen so J cabin drops out. It's very shortsighted
as customers dont readily get to see that sometimes the extra to travel J can be resonable trade up. Oh well they must know more about customer buying behaviour than anyone here.

Unfortunately you have been told somethat that is not true - the VA page has just been coded to only show either Economy Fares or Premium/Business fares as opposed to all fares.

In fact, if you do a flight search for economy fares, the business fares are actually searched for at the same time and can be found in the source code of the 'select flights' web page.

 

[Fruitcake]

In fact, if you do a flight search for economy fares, the business fares are actually searched for at the same time and can be found in the source code of the 'select flights' web page.

Interesting! Sounds like a good opportunity for a greasemonkey script - if only my javascript was a bit better...