Upgrade at airport

Hi

Has anyone had any success at upgrading to upper at the airport after using the economy to premium economy vouchers. If so, how many miles would you normally need? Also, is this likely at Seattle in the middle of the week?

Cheers

Ben

[mitchja]

You can't upgrade the MBNA issued Premium Economy upgrade voucher to Upper Class unfortunately.

From this page:

Expand the 'Premium Economy Reward Upgrade' bit

Once you have redeemed your Premium Economy reward upgrade you may not use miles to upgrade to Upper Class

Thanks for that!

I was just wondering after searching through the forum, that ‘all rules go out of the window once you’re at the airport!’

I suppose it’s worth asking at check in though

Not all rules go out of the window at the airport...!

A couple of years ago a friend was flying LHR-JFK on a V-Hols PE fare that was at the time not upgradeable with miles. He tried his luck at the LHR ticket desk and got lucky - miles & cash upgrade cost all agreed. He'd almost got his card in the card machine when a "supervisory-type" person passed the agent and clocked their computer screen. All of a sudden it was "this is a Virgin Holidays fare - no upgrade possible".

A bit crazy as it was about 3hrs from departure so the odds of VS selling the UC fare for cash was slim, so why not take some miles out of the system & a bit of cash for the upgrade? (Unless there were a lot of gold pax onboard who needed to be looked after so op-ups were more commercially appropriate).

[mitchja]

I believe it's much more difficult for airport staff to override fare rules now. It's the same for many airlines. Back in the old days when all the airline IT systems were terminal and command line based, apparently it was always a lot easier to override fares rules etc. Now everything tends to be GUI based, a lot more restrictions are in place to make sure staff follow the same rules as pax have to.

Slightly un-related, but I do know that when you book a revenue fare and upgrade using miles with VS, only a Flying Club supervisor can manually add the miles for the revenue part of the fare now.

Did you get the bid for upgrade option showing when managing your booking online?
I have upgraded using the PE voucher and am able to bid $774 to upgrade MIA LHR to Upper next week.
Not sure if they'll be an option to upgrade using miles at the airport but will ask.

Slightly un-related, but I do know that when you book a revenue fare and upgrade using miles with VS, only a Flying Club supervisor can manually add the miles for the revenue part of the fare now.

Sounds like VS just put in some sensible controls to limit the number of miles call centre agents can credit to FC accounts. We implemented very similar controls at a company I previously worked for. All call centre workers could raise a request for any refund / eg-gratia payment, but depending on the value it needed differing levels of management approval before it got released if it was over £5. This was on a GUI based system too.

On the old mainframe system anyone could issue anything (or claim any amount by direct debit). Remember when someone input a date in ddmmyyyy format as the monthly DD amount. It was pre-2000, but we still tried to claim say £20,041,999 from a customers bank account. Oddly enough the DD bounced.

While all the above is true and I agree it's very unlikely, but it might still be worth asking IMHO. I managed to upgrade a non-upgradable PE fare to UC about 8 months ago and it only cost me the difference in taxes plus the miles. Granted, I would think they would be less inclined to bend the rules when a PE voucher has already been used, but the worst that can happen is they say no.

Just did online check-in MIA-LHR and the app offered me an upgrade to Upper for $979 even though my booking was a miles flight using a PE upgrade certificate. Too too expensive though.....

Out of interest, does anyone know what bucket upgrade bids put you in for UC? Is it a G or higher?