United MileagePlus (Consolidated) - Best Days for Upgrade EU - SFO

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hi All

After years of travel for work, we are going to take our first EU vacation. I really don't want to fly coach if I can use a system wide. There are no confirm able upgrades available. We are flying SFO to TXL and then Paris or Vienna (still deciding) to SFO.

Is there a better day of the week to travel to increase our upgrade odds. I heard Sunday was bad due to business travel and then someone else said Mon/Tues are bad

I thought i would ask the experts.

Thanks in advance.
MalNSF

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hi All

After years of travel for work, we are going to take our first EU vacation. I really don't want to fly coach if I can use a system wide. There are no confirm able upgrades available. We are flying SFO to TXL and then Paris or Vienna (still deciding) to SFO.

Is there a better day of the week to travel to increase our upgrade odds. I heard Sunday was bad due to business travel and then someone else said Mon/Tues are bad

I thought i would ask the experts.

Thanks in advance.
MalNSF

I've always heard that Tue, Wed, Thu are best. And I usually fly EU/SFO on Tue/Thu when I can.

Note there is a new direct flight announced in future for CDG to SFO. See when that starts and if it fits your schedule.

I don't think there is a direct UA from Vienna to SFO and clearing a SWU from IAD or ORD to SFO is hard, but better odds if you're traveling at strange times Tue-Thu and not competing with business pax.

Good advice from mitchmu, but if I were you I'd try to find flights to Europe that have upgrades available at time of ticketing. UA is far too unreliable at making upgrades available to those who first buy and then are on an upgrade waiting list. In addition, if the upgrades don't come through you'll have paid a higher fare for your economy tickets (which is what you need to do to get upgrade-eligible fares) without it doing you an good in the end.

I believe the UA site has ways of ascertaining upgrade availability, but I usually use the site expertflyer.com because it's more user-friendly. I think it's free for a five-day trial membership, then just $10/month if you want to keep using it. You'd figure out the various routes that can get you to Europe and that have upgrades available for the trans-Atlantic segments, then go ahead and book/ticket with UA. If you do decide to go to Paris (which you definitely should do, as there's no contest between Paris and Vienna for a romantic vacation and Paris is also better for a family vacation), the first routing you'd check would be the SFO-CDG non-stop. But you can also get there through many other routes and connections, such as LHR and FRA (non-stop) or many other options such as AMS, BRU, etc.

(And for certain destinations, such as LHR or especially BRU, you might do best to simply switch to a train upon arrival to get to Paris, but that's a separate discussion.)

The availability of upgrades at time of ticketing of course tends to be better the further in advance you buy, but it sounds like you have some flexibility in choosing dates. That can help a lot in finding flights with available upgrades.

Hope it all works out!

Good advice from mitchmu, but if I were you I'd try to find flights to Europe that have upgrades available at time of ticketing. UA is far too unreliable at making upgrades available to those who first buy and then are on an upgrade waiting list. In addition, if the upgrades don't come through you'll have paid a higher fare for your economy tickets (which is what you need to do to get upgrade-eligible fares) without it doing you an good in the end.

I believe the UA site has ways of ascertaining upgrade availability, but I usually use the site expertflyer.com because it's more user-friendly. I think it's free for a five-day trial membership, then just $10/month if you want to keep using it. You'd figure out the various routes that can get you to Europe and that have upgrades available for the trans-Atlantic segments, then go ahead and book/ticket with UA. If you do decide to go to Paris (which you definitely should do, as there's no contest between Paris and Vienna for a romantic vacation and Paris is also better for a family vacation), the first routing you'd check would be the SFO-CDG non-stop. But you can also get there through many other routes and connections, such as LHR and FRA (non-stop) or many other options such as AMS, BRU, etc.

(And for certain destinations, such as LHR or especially BRU, you might do best to simply switch to a train upon arrival to get to Paris, but that's a separate discussion.)

The availability of upgrades at time of ticketing of course tends to be better the further in advance you buy, but it sounds like you have some flexibility in choosing dates. That can help a lot in finding flights with available upgrades.

Hope it all works out!

I agree with all your points but I chose not to bring up R space at booking because since 3/3 I see no R space at booking, period, between SFO and EU except a handful of days near the end of the year.

However, in another thread, it was mentioned that R space seems to be better xLHR xFRA to IAD/ORD, so it's worth looking there.