I learned something interesting today:

If you use a 100,000 miles and buy a premium coach award to Europe you can then use your DMUTA3's and confirm your Envoy upgrade in advance on that coach ticket. The beauty of the 100,000 coach award is that it is good on any flight with any seats since it is considered "Full Fare".

So for a destination like Rome where J seats are often sold out, you could use 100k miles, plus your cert and confirm a J seat in advance, and even travel on heavily travelled days like a friday night.

I perceive this to be a good deal for someone that wants to use some miles, sit in Envoy class, and fly on specific dates. That additional 20k miles lifts the restriction of availability for the envoy seat.

I confirmed this by calling the international desk and they said it was true.

Cat,

This is 100% true. The wife and I did this over Christmas. It was worth the extra 20K each to guarantee Envoy back and forth to Manchester.

ChazDawg

Uh ... what are DMUTA3's ?

I know what NAU's and SWU's and so forth are but this is a new one on me.

DMUTA3's are the SWU equivalent but only good to Europe. SWU's were good anywhere US flies. DMUTA's are what preferred members got in their packets this year.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum51/HTML/005013.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum51/HTML/004006.html

Maybe now I'll finally use those upgrades that have gone to waste for the past five years...Thanks for the tip!

What class do you upgrade into on an intl. premium coach --> Envoy?

Oooh...maybe I can use this as well. I was trying to figure out how I would use all those UTA3 certs this year, since I almost always fly V to Europe.

Or maybe I'll just have to cave and buy a Q instead and save the miles for a *A RTW or something like that.

Envoy, but the beauty is you can fly any day on any flight to europe.

Um...when you do this, upgrades are still subject to availability (i.e., capacity controlled) right? I enquired about doing this for a trip I want to take next month and was told "there's no availability to upgrade from your Y ticket--check back later."

But, if the agent was wrong, then I'll call again and book. Otherwise, I was just going to monitor flights and book 3-days ahead of when I want to travel so I can upgrade via a call to inventory to open up a couple seats.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by TravelScholar:
[b]Um...when you do this, upgrades are still subject to availability (i.e., capacity controlled) right? I enquired about doing this for a trip I want to take next month and was told "there's no availability to upgrade from your Y ticket--check back later."

[B]</font>

That is correct, they're still capacity controlled, but, just like domestic upgrades, I believe they come from a different bucket meaning that upgrades are more likely to be available before departure in that bucket than in the lower upgrade bucket.

Do these upgrades come out of the same bucket as a B fare?

Bump

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by umguy:
Do these upgrades come out of the same bucket as a B fare? </font>

They should.

But I haven't tried it.

Ok, so today I found out something interesting. All tranatlantic upgrades come out of the same bucket. So if there are none for lower fares there are none for B or Y fares.