Upgrade with Cathay Pacific

[pcol6657]

Hello,
I am new to the frequent flyer game and was wondering if I could get some advice from the experts out there.

I am planning on flying from Sydney to Toronto and return over the Dec/Jan and would like to upgrade my wife and I from Economy to Premium Economy which is an available to option on the return flight from Toronto-Hong Kong-Sydney on the way home.

I have about 80 000 QFF points and 80 000 American express rewards points and was wondering how I would go about doing this.

Should I transfer Amex Rewards to Asia miles and upgrade that way or am I able to upgrade with QFF points?
Which is more likely to work and when will I find out if I have been approved?

Any Advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Joshua]

You could only upgrade using points from Asia miles.. So transferring from your amex mr account.

I have only done business to first class upgrades but in my experience upgrades will only work if there is confirmed award availability on those flights so you can find this out before transferring. On the plus side the upgrade will be immediately confirmed, none of the lottery cough like with Qantas.

You may also want to check if only certain economy booking classes are eligible for upgrade, I have no experience with that.

 

[mitwg]

You may also want to check if only certain economy booking classes are eligible for upgrade, I have no experience with that.

Yep thats how it works with CX. Basically if you have booked an eligible fare class (which is Y, H in economy, may include 1-2 more eligible codes but I cannot think of them from my head), when you go into manage my bookings on CX's website, there should be a button to upgrade that sector. If there's award availability and you have enough miles in your account, you should be able to immediately confirm the upgrade.

Personally though, I would recommend against this upgrade because I don't think it is good value for money. To get an upgrade, you have to buy some of the more expensive economy fares as we have already established above. This alone costs at least an extra few hundred over the normal economy fare (I'll assume V fares here) and at that rate, it may only end up being a few hundred more to purchase E class PE fares outright.

In fact, CX has a deal atm where you can get discount PE fares to HKG for around $1400 from SYD so if you are planning to book soon, you may want to check that out (might have to book SYD-HKG and HKG-YYZ on separate tickets to take advantage of this deal). I have a feeling if you fiddle around with these deals, you may be able to score PE tickets at close to the price of Y/H economy tickets.