Last minute booking to Blighty advice

My father (lives in Manchester) isn't doing too well and I may have to fly home (from Nashville) at short notice.

What is the best way of accomplishing this AND getting UC aside from dropping $7K?

I have about 100K miles.

I'm obviously at the mercy of availability, but my thoughts are cash for M and then miles to upgrade to G.

I don't really care where I exfil from; MCO, NYC, BOS, etc., nor where I land, although Manchester is obviously preferable.

I think I already know the answer - call when I need to fly.

Cheers.

Sorry to hear about your father.

I would just start doing dummy searches for Gs from any of those airports (i.e. Book Flights/Upper Class/Spend Miles). Maybe best to do these searches as one-ways.

If you see availability, call up FC and ask for the M-to-G upgrade price, or just purchase an all-miles ticket online.

The benefit of the all-miles purchase in a situation like this, is that you can move the ticket **as many times as you like** within one year for relatively little (or for free if you are FC Au).

Good luck!

At the US airports, in my experience check-in staff will happily sell a miles upgrade at the desk on the day - subject to seats still being available in UC of course.

As such it's a bit of a risky strategy, so probably only worth considering if all other options fail - but by using something like Flightstats you can easily do a load check to give you some idea of whether a certain flight's full or whether there are still plenty of unsold seats.

The only two routes available to you into Manchester are MCO or LAS, it's peak holiday time and these are leisure routes so I doubt you'll get any availability on these.

Think you'll be looking at Heathrow.

Very little G availability to MAN (11 September LAS-MAN and 5 August MCO-MAN only)

But NYC-LON, there's a lot of availability in the next few months.

Personally I would just keep track of the G availability NYC-LON, which seems to have something every day in July/August/September.

Sorry to read about your predicament .
If you have 100k miles and you are prepared to use them try search from any of the US departure airports with MAN as you destination. The connection from LHR on Little Red would be included.
Have done this in reverse and managed to find availability .
Good luck and hope that everything works out for you.