Originally Posted by
bseller
NO, you cannot request an upgrade for a flight that is "beyond" the expiry date of the instrument you wish to use to support the upgrade. The system will not allow it. A CSR would not do it either, because there is no way to support the request in the record.
I have a somewhat different question -- apologies if it's addressed somewhere in this thread, but I couldn't find it.
I understand that you can't use a 1/11 expiring SWU to upgrade a 2/11 flight. But what happens if you have four SWUs in your account, two expiring in 1/11, the other two in 2/11, and you try to upgrade the same 2/11 flight? In theory, since the 1/11 certs can't support 2/11 travel, the latter certs would be pulled. In practice, though, I've been told that it doesn't work this way and that in the scenario I describe, there's no way to reliably pull the later-expiring SWUs before the earlier ones.
Does anyone have actual, personal experience doing this, either for their own itin or sponsoring someone else's? I'm concerned that no matter what UA tells me, they will botch this.