Using miles on United (mostly an American flier). Just found out that my flight to Shanghai next week is on the 777. I was expecting the lie flat. Totally PO’d. Seems the longest routes are on the 777. Also unfair that for the same miles we in the 777’s get a vastly inferior experience. Asked about using more miles to upgrade to first-there are empty seats-but not allowed. Don’t understand why not. Nothing makes sense with these airlines. They’re SO INFLEXIBLE. The answser is always NO.

And the reality is that things are much better at United now – at least you know if you’re on a 747 or 767, you’ll get the new product! For the longest time, it was a crapshoot as to whether you’d actually get it or not. Now for the 777, well, I hope to see one of those coming soon.

What are the chances that the business class seating upgrades will be complete in 777 by April of 2010?

Zero.

United just has one more 747 to do, and it had said it would start its 777s in February. Now, however, it just says that the 777s will follow the 747s without giving a timeframe. Even if it does start in February, there’s no way it’ll be done by April.

While the FAA certainly does the taxpayer no good, it’s not that difficult to work around. Pretty much any international itinerary can be flown on a foreign-flag carrier using a US carrier’s codeshare flight number, which satisfies the law.

I’d argue the airlines were really stupid about this, and probably contributing this was the older systems. But if airlines used the free upgrade as a tool to expose you to it instead of just upgrading based on how much you’d flown it’d be interesting..

Take a look at how Amazon uses their Prime service. They offer it to some people for free. Probably people that they know have a good buying history with them, but who might both make more purchases as well as get a paid membership. But you only get that once. Then as far as I know they’ll never offer it again.

So what if an airline selected who to give a free upgrade as follows:
1. People who didn’t purchase through a contract that required them to buy coach.
2. Those who haven’t had a free upgrade in over two years.
3. People who fly often.
4. People who buy extra ancillaries. (e.g. BYOB, liquor, check bags, movies etc. The BYOB stuff could really be easily tracked by just putting in the seat number in the new electronic handheld credit card machines, then parsing it all out later.)

This would offer the free upgrades to those who might buy an upgrade later, either as a paid upgrade at the gate, or integrated with the full fare.

If they only offered free upgrades based on this, or for operational reasons it would add some value to F or C without just handing it out willy nilly. If no one met the airline’s marketing requirements for the empty seats they’d fly empty.

Even when I’ve flown in coach, when passing the full front cabin on the way to coach, you can always tell who was upgraded and who paided to sit in front, they just have that upgraded look to them :-)

I think eons ago the airlines thought it would be a good idea to upgrade full Y (or C on three cabin aircraft) thinking if people saw how nice it was they would start buying the higher priced cabin. Well that might have been true in the beginning, but not now. Have you ever seen some of these business men at the check in counter. They act like they are King of the world and how dare the agent not put them in first (or business on a three cabin aircraft) on their coach ticket. That shows the airlines have just made the front cabin worthless dollar wise and it’s just a place to put people who fly a lot but purchase lower cabin fares. So now, why have the product any more?

The airlines always knew they made the money to pay for the flight off the first/business cabins, but continued to give the products away to lower cabin upgraders. Well now with times being tough, they need to get back to saying ‘hey if you want to sit up here, you’ll have to pay for it’.

If you’re buying a bus. class ticket for the comfort of the flat bed on United, you have to check carefully to make sure you’re flying on a 747 or 767 to ASIA. Also, the menus and inflight service are considerably much better on Thai Air or Sing. Air (SQ). There is just no comparison between the Asian carriers’ bus. class inflight service and the US carriers. If you’re searching flight schedules on Thai Air or SQ, you know all their int’l. flights have nice flat beds. The menus and inflight service are so different on Thai Air & SQ, that once you’ve enjoyed their high level of service, you tend to want to avoid US carriers on flights to Asia. Finally, I’ve read that United won’t “start” working on their 777′s conversion ’til Feb. ’10.