DeafFlyer

A friend of mine needs to fly home to take care of family business. He has a ticket on NWA or KLM IAD-AMS-???-Uganda. He has had some surgery due to cancer earlier this year, and finds it difficult to sit for long periods of time. He's willing to tough it out in coach, but would like to know if it's possible to upgrade? He is not a frequent flyer with Worldperks but has a few miles. I want to know if I or others gave him some of our miles could he use them to upgrade. Flight is 12/29/04. If not, is there a way for him to upgrade? He can't afford the price they quoted on the phone, to upgrade. I'm trying to find out for him.

fromYXU

Difficult to upgrade with miles unless it is the right fare ticket: NW only upgrades B and Y fares. As far as KLM it is even more difficult, or impossible, to upgrade with NW miles.

Operational upgrades are a distant possibility and that can only be done at the gate. But, the chances of that happening are slim to none.

Best way to be in BC is to pay for it. Sorry!

stephem

I've actually done this on a few work trips (although not to Africa), upgrading my fiance from coach to WBiz with my miles, on both NW and KLM. If it's fairly last minute, we usually had to buy a Y fare to find upgrade space (still a significant savings over a WBC ticket), but sometimes further out there is actually space for upgrading much cheaper fares (although at an incredibly steep mileage cost). The ticket agents told me there is no difference for mileage upgrade purposes between NW and KLM flights. Once they actually sold us KLM tickets and advised us to take a short flight up to Vancouver since there were upgrade seats available on the KLM plane on the date we needed to fly out. We've never had a hitch with this, as long as space is available. Granted it's expensive to buy Y/B fares for international travel and the lower fares eat up lots of miles when upgrading, this cna be done. You likkely wont be able to move the required miles to his account, it's easiest just to have NWA pull the miles from a single account for the upgrade. I just looked at the upgrade chart (see http://www.nwa.com/freqfly/direct/charts/zone08.shtml) and it looks like 30k each way for a Y and 40k each way for "select" other coach fares to Africa. If your friend doesn't have a "select" coach fare or better, then he's going to be out of luck for a mileage upgrade.

Cap'n Adventure

but there is a difference in seat availability. KL flights might allocate a total of 0-2 WBC seats for WP mileage upgrades. NW flights often allocate more (though not many more) seats for mileage upgrades.

ermdjdsj

If the problem is difficulty sitting for long periods of time, he should try and book aisle seats on all segments of his flight NOW if he has not already done this, so it'll be easier to get up and walk around as much as he needs to while flying in coach.

DeafFlyer

I had a feeling that it couldn't be done w/o paying, but wanted to be sure. I'll tell him to request aisle seats.

Threy

Upgrading on KLM was a walk in the park with KLM FD points or later miles, but has become much more difficult in the last months.Theoretically any KL Flying Dutchman member could upgrade your friend from IAD-AMS for 20.000 KLM miles, if there is availability ( good chance on DEC.29 ) You may post your problem in the KLM or Coupon Connection forum again.

Don`t know the price for the upgrade to Africa now unfortunately.

While it may seem that upgrading on KL using WP miles is difficult, the same is true vice versa.

IIRC I was only able to upgrade a NW operated flight twice in the last 6 or 7 years with more than 80 atlantic crossings on KL/NW and that was NW 67/68 shortly after Sep. 11 ( when it was still a 744 )

It was more or less impossible on the DC 10, if you wanted to do it in advance, but your chances on the day of departure at the lounges was solid.( and DC 10`s were used on basically all other flights, except one MSP flight, which was a B 742 seasonally, IIRC )

Nowadays with KLM having replaced all 743`s and NW flying the A 330 as 67/68, it is impossible without upgrading on the day of dep. at Schiphol, but that is fare class restricted since a couple of months...