American Airlines Wants $2,896 For An Upgrade On A 190-Mile Flight…
American Airlines offers a first class cabin even on its shorter flights, but the expensive upgrade prices may not be commensurate with the experience onboard…just a friendly warning!
An Expensive Upgrade On American Airlines
View From The Wing noticed a steal of an upgrade price on American Airlines: just $2896 to upgrade from economy class to first class on the 190-mile, 36-minute intra-Texas flight from Austin (AUS) to Dallas (DFW). Honey, hold the mortgage…we’re going to Dallas!
Incredibly tempting upgrade offer.
byu/Many-Nose4266 inamericanairlines
A little pricey, but it gets to the heart of the sense (or nonsense) behind airline upgrades.
This is not a complaint or a slight against American Airlines. Certainly in situations like this, it can charge what the market will bear and if there is only one seat, maybe someone who can expense it will buy it…it isn’t only politicians who don’t care about spending other people’s money…
And AA isn’t exactly transparent about the way it prices upgrades…upgrading on AA is like a box of chocolates…you never know what you’re going to get. Prices can fluctuate rapidly and be dependent on variables that may make sense programmatically (fare bucket availability) but don’t make sense in theory.
I’ll speculate about this case. There was one first class seat left (what Americans and AA call first class, the rest of the world calls business class) and so the fare bucket avaiailblity may have looked something like this: J1R0D0I0 (J, R, D, I are all first class fares, but last-seat availality maybe reserved fo the highest…and most expenisve..fare class).
And yes, AA does have a “full-fare” J ticket for $2826 for sale…
So perhaps someone who bought a cheap ecnomy class ticket was offered this upgrade price becuase that is what a walk-up ticket cost on a (of course this probably could have cut by as much as 80-90% by taking advantage of hidden city ticketing and adding a destination beyond Dallas, then just stepping off in Dallas, but that’s another matter for another day).
Bottom line, there’s logic to the illogic, but your money is better spent elsewhere…