Upgrading an M Fare

Hi,

I'm a little confused about this process and what availability is required.

If someone has purchased an M fare ticket, can you then use miles to upgrade this ticket to PE or UC regardless of availability of fares in the upper classes? Or do reward fares need to be available?

If one was to upgrade an M fare to UC, would you also pay the difference in taxes etc between the ticket types?

Thanks

Hey,
There would still need to be availability of reward fares in the cabin you were looking to upgrade to. And yes, you would need to pay the tax difference as well although they don't come to very much. I think my S class PE to UC tax was about £60

In brief, yes and yes.

Reward seats need to be available to upgrade from an M Economy fare. I have only ever booked an M fare when I knew there was a UC upgrade seat available. If you book the M fare and then there are no upgrades available at a later point in time, you have to fly Economy and at a price you could almost certainly have got cheaper as M fare is not the cheapest Economy bucket..

You will be liable for the difference in taxes between an M fare and a PE and UC reward seat fare.

The minimum you would have to pay for upgrading from Y to PE or UC is £71 which is the additional APD for non economy cabins. If you were upgrading from PE to UC there is no additional APD as you would have already paid the correct rate as part of the PE ticket.

PLUS whatever VS charges in additional fees and surcharges.

And there has to be reward availability in the cabin you want not just VS selling seats for cash.

Thanks for the info - cleared it up a bit for me.

For what reason would someone buy an M fare and then upgrade to UC (Unless they just didn't have the amount of miles required for a full UC reward)?

PS. I'm new to this game so still trying to understand the various options and my question above may be slightly biased as I have managed to amass around 250,000 miles since March without having taken a flight yet so my perception at the moment is that raising 100,000 miles isn't all the difficult!

Thanks again.

Buying a full reward flight (i.e. spending only miles) doesn't get you any tier points or miles once the flight has been taken. By purchasing a flexible economy fare (i.e. anything from M up to Y) and then upgrading means that you would receive the appropriate miles and TPs for a flexible economy ticket (i.e. 100% miles and 3 TPs per sector). The same applies with upgrading PE fares, someone could buy an S or a W ticket and then upgrade to UC (150% miles and 4 TPs, and half the number of miles to upgrade, but greater ££ cost).

It's basically a middle-ground between a full revenue ticket (maximum earning potential, but potentially highest cost) and a full reward ticket (lowest cost, but no earning potential).

It also means that in the event that a reward seat never materialises, you still have a seat on the plane, albeit not quite as close to the front as you wanted to be!

[honey lamb]

For what reason would someone buy an M fare and then upgrade to UC (Unless they just didn't have the amount of miles required for a full UC reward)?

You get miles for the revenue part of the flight if you upgrade from an M fare but get no miles for a full reward flight.

Sorry to jump in, but is there a way to easily locate M fare tickets?

Sadly not any more on the VS website.

You can do it on the ITA Matrix if you know how to use that. Otherwise just call Flying Club (which you'd have to do anyway to upgrade to a G).