PE Upgrade

I have enough miles for an ecomomy miles reward flight to LAS (although looks like have to travel to LAX initially as no rewards on LAS as usual) and an Amex PE upgrade. I intend to travel with a mate, can i give my miles and upgrade to him and then travel myself in a paid PE seat so i can obtain the miles and tier points for the flight in the paid seat and we share the total cost

[Neil]

Yes, you will need to book the ticket, but you can use your miles for to buy a ticket for another person. Remember that with the AmEx PE upgrade voucher, there needs to be PE (U class) seats available only, there doesn't need to be any economy seats.

Neil

Neil, thanks for the rapid reply, cheers Paul

[Neil]

No you certainly can't do it in advance. As with anything once at the airport anything might be possible, although again the rules don't allow it.

As Neil said the rules don't allow it, however recently coming back from JFK, there were four of us using Y miles with AMEX upgrade vouchers to PE.

After checking in i asked at the ticket desk if it was possible to upgrade to UC using miles. A quick call from the ticket desk agent to FC and they said yes 20000 miles each for the upgrade. y)

I have tried this previously and was told i would have to pay the miles from Y to UC and lose the leg of the voucher, and also NO. v(

So i have no idea why they allowed it this time, the UC cabin was full in fact we took the last 4 UC seats, and both PE and Y were half empty so they wouldn't have been looking to upgrade anyone to free up seats.

I guess it was just luck, or my enigmatic smile.

Chumba - at many of the outstations the local staffs' knowledge of the rule set is less than at the core. I'm guessing you were lucky, and no bad thing at that, I'm supposing they looked at your booking, saw a 'U' and let you go for a 'G', without looking back into the history ... it's worked creatively for me too a few times but in different ways!

[Neil]

Good result Chumba.

It also backs up exactly what we say on here, once at the airport anything can happen. As Slinky has said, outsourced staff often don't know or understand the rules and if you are clever you can use that to your advantage sometimes.

It never harms to ask, more often you will be told no, but as you have proved that odd yes can be heard also.