Las Vegas, best use of miles

Not sure of the best way to do this and would be more than grateful for the v-flyer experts advice please. I have 75,000 miles which is not quite enough for an M&M UC, so was looking at UC one way, PE the other, or is there a better way of using those miles to try and nab UC both ways? The flights to LAS always seem difficult to get availability and my dates are somewhat fixed/non-flexible leaving on 13/14 or 20/21 Nov are my preferred. Is it worth booking PE in a class that I might be able to upgrade at a later date? Open to suggestions, thanks.

With availability not being reliable, it's a bit of a gamble. If you book a K PE fare, then you are gambling that S PE fares will be available in the event that an UC reward seat comes up. (Otherwise you'll have to pay an enormous fare difference to get to an upgradeable PE fare.) If you buy an S PE fare now, you're gambling that an UC reward seat will come up -- otherwise you might as well have bought the non-upgradeable K. The difference in price is around £350 I think, so not to be sniffed at.

The best value, in my view, is to book economy and try to upgrade with miles from there -- but of course that then is biggest gamble of all, because if no reward seats open up you get stuck in economy. :0 Others may recommend booking the upgradeable PE fare to be ready if any Gs appear.

It's a difficult one - with availability not great, hard to know what to do. Having been in this kind of situation myself, I book the base fare in a class I am ultimately 'happy' to fly, and then watch availability like a hawk, treating the two sectors as separate problems to solve.

I realise you'll probably have figured this out for yourself! Ironically the combi reward, which could conceivably be useful to you if availability suddenly appeared for one leg, is not available for UC...

Happy Christmas.

[preiffer]

Go via LAX. Normally plenty of availability, and the VX connections aren't bad either...

(Just adds a little bit of extra time onto the trip.)

I second Paul, but then VS's redemption availability even to LAX is very oddly managed at the moment.

I would have mentioned LAX but advance availability of Gs on the return sectors has been dreadful for the past 9 months.

Thanks all. It's odd that I like a gamble, that I am going to Vegas but I won't gamble on the seat availability from econonmy to PE ! I shall consider the LAX thing, but I suspect that I will book PE and take it from there.

One more question: what do you use to check availability of fares in certain classes?

I use KVS and sometimes the availability search on flightstats.com. There is also the fare code search on the VS website - found in the cabin upgrade section of the flying club section of the website.