upgrades

[NM]

It is very likely that Qantas actually do sell one or more of these 'spare' seats at these premium rates every week. (e.g. Corporate fliers travelling on v. short notice)

And in addition to being able to sell them, they can also make the available for displaced passengers (i.e. paid business class passengers who have missed an earlier connection) or people needing to make last minute flight changes and who have fully flexible tickets.

Also note that some of these last minute "sales" may be via ticket endorsements from other carriers who are unable carry their passenger due to missed connections, over-booking, aircraft change or whatever. Either way, such endorsements result in real revenue for Qantas. So they may have determined from historic data how many seats is optimal to leave available on different routes for different days of the week etc.

Yield management is a real black art and very much based on analysing historic statics and predicting what may happen in the future - sometimes that future may be 330 days ahead, 30 days ahead, 30 hours ahead or even 30 minutes ahead.

 

[simongr]

Having sat in LAX for 7 hours I have sat and watched as person after person went up to the AC AAngels asking for changes to lfights due to displacements/cancellations/delays or just plain depseration to get home faster.

That's just an example of what I have seen f revenue management in action - the only way that I feel you could can feel a little gypped is if you look in the J/F cabin during travel (if you can get past the curtain) and see some empty seats