Any tips for flight upgrades?

[Tingss]

I've successfully upgraded my international flight three times this year and I'm heading to LAX soon and was going to upgrade it too. Being a longer flight, I'm really wanting to have it upgraded.

I was wondering if there are any tips in
- figuring out business class capacity a week before the flight to figure out if I should pay for an upgrade over points if it looks like it's a heavily booked out flight, (or even swap to another flight)
- or is flight upgrades via points a first come first serve after they consider the status level (I'm gold)

Any insights into how they do upgrades would be much appreciated!

 

[RooFlyer]

Its always been a bit of a black box. But as far as I know, factors that increase your chances of getting a points upgrade are (and I'm not sure the order in which they are applied - probably some metric combining them all, and maybe more):

* Apply as early as possible - a week or two before the flight is usually way too late.
* Higher the status, higher the chances. Gold has moderate chance, if you got in very early and its not a popular flight (like SYD/MEL-LAX/DFW etc)
* The amount you have spent on the airline (there's an acronym for this but I can't recall it).

Points seats and points upgrade seats I think are the same category; if one has gone, there aren't any of the other left either.

 

[JohnM]

Choose the day of the week you fly to avoid the 'business rush' times. Mid-week is probably best.

Expert Flyer can be helpful as a guide.

Status, allied with the fare that you have bought, has to be a major factor, so it's luck of the draw depending on who's in front of you in the pecking order. Upgrading from PE is a better chance than from flex whY.

Busy routes like SYD/MEL-LAX are always going to be tight on availability.

Confirming what @RooFlyer says: award seats and upgrade seats in Business are both U class. Again, ExpertFlyer is your friend in scoping flight options or pop a request into this helpful thread: Flight Availability/Loadings & Upgrade Probability Help Desk

 

[Flying mermaid]

I would agree with mid week as giving you the best chance. I have been able to upgrade Master FM a few times (as a silver) mid week, but never had success on a Friday evening.

 

[Tingss]

Choose the day of the week you fly to avoid the 'business rush' times. Mid-week is probably best.

Expert Flyer can be helpful as a guide.

Status, allied with the fare that you have bought, has to be a major factor, so it's luck of the draw depending on who's in front of you in the pecking order. Upgrading from PE is a better chance than from flex whY.

Busy routes like SYD/MEL-LAX are always going to be tight on availability.

Confirming what @RooFlyer says: award seats and upgrade seats in Business are both U class. Again, ExpertFlyer is your friend in scoping flight options or pop a request into this helpful thread: Flight Availability/Loadings & Upgrade Probability Help Desk

Thank you for these tips, was exactly what I was looking for. That thread and website is amazing, really great to be able to check the availability of seats before I purchase to have a better guesstimate of likelihood of upgrades and plane capacity.

Just got 2 questions if you don't mind:-
1 - All those classes have a a value of 0 to 9, do those represent the number of seats or just an indicator of availability with 0 being sold out? The first post in that thread doesn't explain it clearly
2 - Does anyone also know if I had one booking for myself (gold) and a partner (silver) and we both upgraded, do they look at the booking upgrades at the highest status of the booking? Or they look at it individually (meaning there's a chance where I'll be upgraded and not him)

There seems to be a lot of status credit promotions this year, trying to work my way to platinum by August!

 

[JohnM]

The maximum of 9 means at least 9 seats available in that fare bucket. I guess they want to keep the system to single digits, so 9 is the highest number displayed.

If it shows <9, that is the exact number they are prepared to sell, at that instant, in that fare bucket. Zero means zero.

Note that the numbers given can total more than the number of seats in that cabin, so it's got nothing to do with the actual seats. It's all about how many seats they are prepared to sell at a given price at that instant. It can be dynamic - hence upgrades just prior to the flight.

I'm guessing, but your request for two upgrades will enhance the chances of the PS only if the booking is linked to yours.

 

[Tingss]

The maximum of 9 means at least 9 seats available in that fare bucket. I guess they want to keep the system to single digits, so 9 is the highest number displayed.

If it shows <9, that is the exact number they are prepared to sell, at that instant, in that fare bucket. Zero means zero.

Note that the numbers given can total more than the number of seats in that cabin, so it's got nothing to do with the actual seats. It's all about how many seats they are prepared to sell at a given price at that instant. It can be dynamic - hence upgrades just prior to the flight.

I'm guessing, but your request for two upgrades will enhance the chances of the PS only if the booking is linked to yours.

Thank you so much for your insights, learnt a lot!

 

[JohnM]

Don't forget to post the result of your effort.

 

[RichardMEL]

Slight correction on EF (and other) availability displays -

Booking class availability does NOT reflect *actual* seats available, it reflects the maximum number of seats a carrier is willing to *sell* for that particular flight at the time of enquiry (such that is thus possible to become oversold). Also availability can depend on many factors such as point of sale (you can sometimes see different numbers depending on what location you're looking to buy from) and if looking to book connecting flights, or the flight (say SYD-LAX) is part of a larger availability search, where the airline may be eiher limiting sales, or availability is limited by a particular sector's avail. For example, let's say ADL-SYD is J9 C6 D5 I0 and SYD-LAX is J9 C9 D9 I4, you may see ADL-LAX as showing J9 C6 D5 I0, because of the more limited inventory on the connecting sector.,