US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - No more tele-upgrade?

I just called Gold Preferred Reservations to upgrade my flights this weekend. When I selected 1 for "Automated Service" and 2 for "Upgade to First Class", I got a message that said that "Tele-upgrade has been removed from service. Please hold, and you will be assisted by the next available Gold Preferred sales representative."

What's the deal? Did I miss something? Also, the agent that I spoke to INSISTED that I give her the STAR CODE from the upgrade certificate. Are they trying to be more strict about upgrades or something?

Hmm, I upgraded early this morning (out of BOS too) and the agent didn't ask. Just the usual "I have DMUP01's, can I upgrade on flight xxx," seat selection et al. and then "Have your Upgrade Certs with you."


[This message has been edited by unixguy (edited 04-10-2001).]

I asked the same question about the tele-upgrade on March 9 in the following thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum51/HTML/000841.html
(Yeah, so we got off on a bit of a tangent.)
So anyway, it does seem like the tele-upgrade has been discontinued (at least for now), and I don't remember hearing any announcement about the service being discountinued either. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

I was also asked for the star code (for the first time ever) last month when upgrading.


Originally posted by ThisFlightNoFuel:
I just called Gold Preferred Reservations to upgrade my flights this weekend. When I selected 1 for "Automated Service" and 2 for "Upgade to First Class", I got a message that said that "Tele-upgrade has been removed from service. Please hold, and you will be assisted by the next available Gold Preferred sales representative."

What's the deal? Did I miss something? Also, the agent that I spoke to INSISTED that I give her the STAR CODE from the upgrade certificate. Are they trying to be more strict about upgrades or something?

I spoke to a res agent, and was advised that tele upgrade was removed from service in order to try and reduce abuses of upgrades, etc. For example, pax saying they had a system wide, and then trying to use 800 mile certs. I'm not sure how removing tele upgrade helps this, etc. The rep did not mention it, but another reason I suspect tele upgrade was removed involves the new rule ss re no upgrades on domestic e-saver fares. It may have been that the teleupgrade system was not "smart enough" to know if you had an e-saver fare. Thus it may have allowed pax to upgrade on e-saver fares. My feeling is that this is the reason it was taken off line perhaps among others.

When I called to upgrade my flight to NYC I was asked what the star code was as well. I was in SYD and I'm like, "I don't have a clue, the 800 mile certs." The res agent was ok with that answer.

I have never used the tele-upgrade, so I can't comment on how one would abuse that system. But I do enjoy talking with a rez agent for a quick little chat to upgrade. Yesterday I had a plesant conversation with 'Sue' as she helped me out with my seat selection on the A319 to PIT and the MD80 to PVD this weekend (was seat selection possible with the tele-upgrade?).

and I wasn't asked for a Star Code with my upgrade this time either.

Originally posted by jetsetter:
I spoke to a res agent, and was advised that tele upgrade was removed from service in order to try and reduce abuses of upgrades, etc. For example, pax saying they had a system wide, and then trying to use 800 mile certs. I'm not sure how removing tele upgrade helps this, etc. The rep did not mention it, but another reason I suspect tele upgrade was removed involves the new rule ss re no upgrades on domestic e-saver fares. It may have been that the teleupgrade system was not "smart enough" to know if you had an e-saver fare. Thus it may have allowed pax to upgrade on e-saver fares. My feeling is that this is the reason it was taken off line perhaps among others.

I would probably buy the issue re denial of e-savers over the other issue. However, I'm sure that US could easily fix this problem by simply recoding their e-saver fares to something like VE1ESAVR. I couldn't imagine that their software is so dumb as to not recognize a string which would be recognized as an e-saver fare. Then again, we're talking about US...

Re: the first theory re: abuse of upgrades. While in theory, this is very possible, I'm not sure if the practice can be done. The last time I used DMUPSYS upgrades was during Xmas when I had both the outbound and returned upgraded. JFK, the day before my outbound departure, I called to reconfirm the reservation. While I was at it I decided to hit Option 2 (the upgrade option) to see what would happen. After entering in all the info, and after receiving the "One moment please" response, it said that it was kicking me to the "next available Dividend Miles Silver Preferred Sales Representative." I get the feeling that it did this because my itinerary was already upgraded in G class and the system did not know how to or could not upgraded a ticket already upgraded. So, unless the person calls the day he is to upgrade, cancel the SWU upgrade, and then chance it at using segment upgrades, I can't see how this would work.

I'd bet on the 'system too stupid' theory. Folks, how many of us are getting bonus miles because of bonus codes we registered for randomly? You'd think that they could figure out a way to limit these special bonus codes to only those who are targeted to get it, but they didn't.

USAirways IT is in the dark ages...... I should give them my old Tandy 1000 so they can upgrade their servers <grin>

ITRADE ,
I think the way it worked is that some pax call in and say they are upgrading using dmupsys certificates, and then at the airport, present 800 mile certs instead. The pax do this of course to upgrade prior to the 1 or 3 or 7 day window. They take a gamble that the gate agent will just take anything that looks like an upgrade, rather than looking at the record to see what kind of upgrade was entered into the reservation. I don't know in practice what US gate agents do (if anything) when they encounter this situation at the airport. The res agent I talked too seemed to say this was a problem US was having, and I guess it makes sense that they ask for the star code now, etc. But the cert type swap would not involve the tele upgrade system at all.

Another issue, at least when US used the pacer reservation system (the one before the current Sabre system) was that a pax could upgrade via tele upgrade, but then not answer the question having to do with whether they were upgrading with certs or by paying. The system would first upgrade the pax to the upgrade booking code, and then ask about method of upgrade. If the pax hung up or otherwise did not answer the method of upgrade question, the system would have upgraded the res but would not document the record re method of upgrade. If the pax did answer the system would document the record with either the h/code of the cert, or something re the paid upgrades. Perhaps US had a problem where pnr s were upgraded with no documentation of how the upgrade was done, and then the pax maybe claimed it was for free, etc. Though a very very small percent of pax probably were aware of how teleupgrade documented the PNR, etc. If you doubt this, ask your seat mate, "how did teleupgrade document the PNR," and they'll probably look at you like your talking Greek.
Also many US agents were not familiar with the fact that a teleupgrade system even existed. When teleupgrade made history entries in pacer it would show up as:
IVR PR PR
or something like that where when a person did it it would be
WS1 SU EJ
Where WS1 is the INT (Winston Salem res center) SU means a supervisor (in terms of the pacer sine), and EJ are the sine or initials of the agent.

Or it might look like:
LGA PD SJ
For LGA, PD is an airport agent sine (stands I think for post departure) and the two letter sine.

Sabre seems to use the station, and then three letters for the sine like:
PIT/JMS
etc.
I think the electronic check in kiosks have sineslike:
DCA/KI3
etc. Your "sine" is essentially your ID in the computer.
Like you will hear ticket agents say "I am still logged in under my sine," or "who['s sign is LGA/BRK...they just gave somebody a J class upgrade for nothing," etc. or simply "who is BRK" etc. If you look at your flight coupon ticket or receipt it should also show the station and sine of the agent that issued it. Your e-ticket boarding passes also show the station and sine of issue at the top. Again like:
DFW/L1J
etc. Bag tags as well.