Seat Selection Unavailable - J Fare

[MartinMemo]

Same experience here for J seat selection on 73H, I received same screen shot as Serfty , there are four of us in J so do I need to make a phone call to allocate seats?

Yeah make the quick painless call now to save pain later. It'll only take 20 seconds.

 

[eastwest101]

Yeah make the quick painless call now to save pain later. It'll only take 20 seconds.

Lets go through the numbers - say 700 business class seats per day in the fleet (4 sectors per day) then 50% load factor = say 1416 people calling for seat allocation per day (2 mins each for a call to the guest call centre) equals 47 hours per day of phone operators allocating business class seats, thats the equivalent of 3-4 full time position provided to the GCC. Depending on wages at the call centre that would be at least $100K-$150K per year. And thats J class pax only.

Yes I know - not everyone phones the call centre to get J class seats allocated but you would think that someone in VA between now and Jan 2013 would have done a back of the envelope like this and started to think about it.

 

[MartinMemo]

Lets go through the numbers - say 700 business class seats per day in the fleet (4 sectors per day) then 50% load factor = say 1416 people calling for seat allocation per day (2 mins each for a call to the guest call centre) equals 47 hours per day of phone operators allocating business class seats, thats the equivalent of 3-4 full time position provided to the GCC. Depending on wages at the call centre that would be at least $100K-$150K per year. And thats J class pax only.

Yes I know - not everyone phones the call centre to get J class seats allocated but you would think that someone in VA between now and Jan 2013 would have done a back of the envelope like this and started to think about it.

You make a good point - id say 50% of projects i have worked on have had something to do with trying to stop clients calling call centers because it costs a fortune, and the other 50% would have been fixing out online portals so clients can do as much there as possible. In my industry this is the sort of thing that would be jumped on immediately, (especially when you consider the J class GCC is 24/7 onshore) - If 1400 people were truly calling a day, id estimate the cost to be well over to $1m p/a based on average cost of a call on-shore, rent and cost of not servicing other channels (like sales).

All because VA wont let me select 1A at time of booking!

 

[MartinMemo]

That all being said, depending on what is causing it, hiring your IT company to fix it could easily cost more than that.

 

[serfty]

That all being said, depending on what is causing it, hiring your IT company to fix it could easily cost more than that.

I am thinking VA is stuck with SABRE and their outsource teams for the foreseeable future.

 

[maninblack]

Can confirm J class seat selection worked for me today for Embraer but not for B738

 

[MartinMemo]

Can confirm J class seat selection worked for me today for Embraer but not for B738

So they have fixed E-Jets but broken Boeing's. Haha.