Does this sound right?

Booked a couple of EC reward seats during the recent sale and upgraded to PE using a couple of VS cc EC-PE upgrades. Noticed that there were two UC reward seats on the LGW-MCO leg on the 27, we are on the 15, so enquired about upgrading. Told it would be £116 for the two of us but an extra 50k miles each because we had used a sale EC ticket. We used 22.5k miles for the initial reward seat but this does not seem to we taken into account, 50k miles being the going rate for UC one leg on this route. I I had thought of buying the extra 40k miles we needed but not sure if it is worth it. Any thoughts?

[Neil]

The rules state that you can't upgrade further with miles if you have used the PE reward vouchers, so I have no idea what rules they are using to upgrade your fare, which makes it difficult to say if what they are doing is correct unfortunately.

I thought in order use your EC-PE upgrades you have to be using miles to buy the tickets in the first place and you could not upgrade above PE from there, so I'm surprised you were even offered the chance to upgrade to UC?
Excuse me if I'm wrong, I hope those more fully converse in this will come on and correct that if so as I would be interested to know as I am intending to use my CC upgrades for flights next year to upgrade from EC to PE and would love to be able to spend more miles in order to upgrade to UC from there.

Thanks for the responses, glad to see you are as confused as I am. Will call again to see if another agent says the same thing. I called the regular number before and was transferred to a member of the premier team so you would hope they know what they are doing :0

Thanks for the responses, glad to see you are as confused as I am. Will call again to see if another agent says the same thing. I called the regular number before and was transferred to a member of the premier team so you would hope they know what they are doing :0

One lives in hopes, but doubts

Just rang again a and spoke to a different agent and this is the result. Change of flight plus taxes etc. £116. Upgrade outbound leg from PE reward to UC G seats - 25k miles extra each! So I grabbed it and just checked MYB and selected 8 and 9k for the new flight. Surprised and pleased but just waiting for someone at VS to call and say its a mistake

I think you have benefitted from a slight misunderstanding, because (as others have said) the CC PE voucher is not supposed to be upgradeable. Has the booking been ticketed yet? If not, hold your breath...

The miles have gone from the FC account and the cc payment has been earmarked but no e ticket yet. I will not be surprised if this all goes pear shaped but you never know might be lucky! :w

Fingers crossed for you!

Hope you are successful - I am on VS15 travelling to MCO in PE so any CH invites with your new found luck would be appreciated!!!

Hope you are successful - I am on VS15 travelling to MCO in PE so any CH invites with your new found luck would be appreciated!!!

I'll keep that in mind but we will probably end up back in PE anyway waiting for the call....

Surprise surprise just had a call from the premier team explaining what had happened. Although the t&c say you cannot upgrade with miles to UC they do in fact upgrade sometimes! Discretion is the word used. Anyway because of the way in which they do things, gave me back the 45k miles used buy the original EC reward tickets, then took an additional 50k each for the upgrade to UC! Mrs Needsomesun had enough miles to cover this upgrade and with my 45k refunded so did I! Confusing or what!! Anyway further explained that actually we needed to use an additional 22.5k each for the upgrade to UC. Unfortunately we do not have the miles and buying miles does not seem worth it. So we are back in PE waiting for OLCI. Thanks for listening ii)

Unlucky - guess we will be in PE together on the same flight and competing for the best Trip Report!

One last thing... As a gesture to recognise confusion/inconvenience etc. promised to add a note to our booking re an on the day, subject to availability, upgrade opportunity. Nice touch but this will of course be after any gold or silver FC flyers so not much chance. Plan to do a TR hopefully from upstairs if it's a non refurb or downstairs for a refurb so it will interesting to compare notes.

Oh what a shame, I have to earmark this thread for when I want to use my CC PE vouchers and remind them that they do sometimes allow the upgrade to UC using miles ! Where they more specific as to how/why/when this allow ability becomes available?

Oh what a shame, I have to earmark this thread for when I want to use my CC PE vouchers and remind them that they do sometimes allow the upgrade to UC using miles ! Where they more specific as to how/why/when this allow ability becomes available?

Hi SNOMO, I got the feeling that when speaking to the premier team they were more prepared to be flexible regarding the upgrade. Saying that when I got through on the normal 'if you are RED key 1' route they guy did not seem to have any issues around the concept. I think that if you just say you have a reward PE seat and want to upgrade to UC they don't seem to be overly worried about how you got your reward seat. If you are AU then probably best to use the premier team and see how flexible they can be. Would mention that for the brief time we were possibly travelling UC 'so near yet so far...' there were 4 available seats in UC at least 2 of which were reward seats, so might be they want to fill the seats - but this just my opinion. One day we will make it to UC, but I think its unlikely it will be this flight One last point, the lady on the premier team said that all of their transactions are audited and sometimes 'errors' like this are adjusted internally and sometimes they contact the passenger and explain the issue and negotiate some sort mutually agreeable solution - again my opinion depends on the agent.

We have upgraded to UC when travelling on a PE voucher. We upgraded to UC at the airport ticket desk in JFK a couple of years ago.

It cost us about 12,500 miles each + c.£40 fuel surcharge. They also moved us from the VS4 to VS46 as the latter had the availability.

We have upgraded to UC when travelling on a PE voucher. We upgraded to UC at the airport ticket desk in JFK a couple of years ago.

It cost us about 12,500 miles each + c.£40 fuel surcharge. They also moved us from the VS4 to VS46 as the latter had the availability.

Thanks for the info, must remember to ask when we get to the airport.

We have upgraded to UC when travelling on a PE voucher. We upgraded to UC at the airport ticket desk in JFK a couple of years ago.

It cost us about 12,500 miles each + c.£40 fuel surcharge. They also moved us from the VS4 to VS46 as the latter had the availability.

Thanks for the info, must remember to ask when we get to the airport.

Good plan. Just don't mention you're on an AMEX voucher. I believe we were able to upgrade because the agents at the airport can only see 'P' class, and don't know the background behind the ticket.

I've tried to upgrade to UC three times when using the upgrade vouchers, been successfull once, that was at Gatwick, in St Lucia it was a flat No because of the wrong ticket type, the last time was at Heathrow when we got as far as getting the credit card out before they realised it couldn't be done.
We didn't mention we had used upgrade vouchers on any of the occasions, just appeared to be luck on the day.

Thanks Needsomesun and every one else, thats really interesting will give all options a go when the time comes.