Originally Posted by ijgordon
So, what you are saying CO Insider, is that there really was never a valid reason for this closed waitlist business? You're just going to change the policy, like that? While I truly think that's great, how many other CO policies are in place that make no sense??
I wish it were that easy,
ijgordon. But after 11 years with Continental, I've found that just about everything we do has a pretty good reason behind it. When it came to reconsidering our closed waitlist policy, we had people from at least 6 different departments working together behind the scenes to make it work.
There were two key reasons why we ever had a closed upgrade waitlist policy in the first place.
1. Waitlists create a lot of challenges for us - both technically and oerationally. Until recently, we didn't have a mechanism in place to notify customers when their upgrade waitlist expired - as a result, one of our most popular confrontations at the airport was customers who were 'surprised' that their upgrade waitlist didn't clear and that they weren't eligible to stand by. These confrontations seldom ended quickly, or on a good note. By capping our upgrade waitlists, we were able to at least keep this to a small, manageable population of customers.
2. It used to be that some upgrade awards required the purchase of a higher fare. That said, we didn't want to require a customer to buy a higher fare only to place themselves on an upgrade waitlist that wouldn't likely clear. It not only made the issues in #1 worse, but there were genuine concerns of legal exposure. Now that BusinessFirst upgrades can be redeemed at any published fare level, this became much less of an issue.
For us to be able to lift waitlist thresholds, we needed some foundational solutions in place. First, we needed to remove the element of surprise for those customers whose waitlists don't clear. Starting this month, we're going to be proactively contacting customers as soon as their their waitlist expires to make sure they know in advance that their upgrade did not and will not clear. Our belief is that our customers at minimum appreciate some advance notice when the news is bad. It seems to be 10x worse when customer hears about it for the first time 1-2 hours before departure. Second, we needed to clean the waitlists out of the reservation so that the customer could at least use online or kiosk check-in. It's a minor point, but it's one of those that compounds an already tough situation. Third, we needed to ensure that we re-deposited any unused upgrade awards at the time of waitlist expiration.
So, in the end, we made all the needed changes, and our upgrade waitlist threshold policy is no more. But it was hardly
just like that!
Originally Posted by ijgordon
What about the 72-cum-24 hour rule for BF upgrades? I realize it's been discussed ad nauseum over the years, and some progress was made with the change to 24 hours, but it's still an uncompetitive and customer-unfriendly policy.
We actually do have reasons for our 24-hour waitlist expiration, and I don't see this changing anytime soon. First, we have the challenges outlined above about managing customer expectations too close to departure. Second, and most importantly, we're not willing to do anything that could jeopardize our demand for premium cabin fares. Making it easy to stand by for upgrade awards at the airport would potentially risk our ability to sell these seats at their intended retail value. And that's not a risk we can afford to take.