BC upgrade buckets weirdness...

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When looking at business class upgrades for a few trips on the Wolverine, I noticed something a bit strange - while the upgrade for ARB-CHI or CHI-ARB slways shows up as costing $13 over the base rail fare, frequently the base rail fare I have to pay jumps several buckets after I choose BC. As such, what initially appears as a $45 ticket sometimes magically becomes an $89 ticket once I reach the confirmation screen. Why exactly is this? Is it that they are separating the rail fare buckets for coach and BC (so a trip could be low bucket coach, but high bucket BC)? If so, I do think the current site design is quite annoying - if I see "Add $13" for business class, I expect it to add $13 to the displayed coach fare, not some separate fare that isn't displayed until later...

Related to this - if I had a low bucket coach ticket and wanted to upgrade to BC onboard (given availability), would they charge me just the upgrade fee or would they charge me the full difference between the BC ticket cost at departure time and my ticket's cost? Based on how sleeper upgrades work, I would assume the former, but I am not certain...
 
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I would guess that Amtrak is applying revenue management principles to BC as it does to coach. Does this happen on all departures every day of the week in both directions, or just at high demand times/days?

With the limited number of seats available in BC on those trains, I'd guess that they would rather sell it at a higher price when they can.
 
Don't think so - the fares I was looking at were without discounts (at least none showed on the confirmation page). They are doing a special on Michigan trains now, but it isn't good for travel after April...
 
Coach and business class are pulled from different buckets. Don't know why. That's just the way it is.

It comes up every couple of months or so on here. In fact, I think there was a thread where this came up maybe a couple of weeks ago.
 
Just saw something even weirder - for my trip departing tomorrow, I noticed that there was a low-bucket BC seat available. With the 20% Michigan service discount, that came out to only $3 or so more than I had paid for my coach ticket (which had been a medium-bucket with the same discount). I could have probably switched to a low-bucket coach ticket, but then I would have lost my AGR Take 5 bonus - making the BC definitely worth it. I went ahead and called to change my ticket - I was definitely impressed with the Wolverine BC when I had it ARB-CHi on my last trip (it has the nice 2x1 seating with lots of legroom).

However, as it turns out, that was the *last* BC seat on the train (it said only 1 left when I checked the website, and after they made the change for me that one seat was gone). Any idea *why* this would happen? I figured the last BC seat would be at high-bucket since BC and coach buckets are separate. This is almost as bizarre as the $123 roomette I got BOS-TOL a few days before departure back in March...
 
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