Originally Posted by
blueking77
Hi all
I fly from London to New York about 6x a year in economy and also do some flying for work so have accumulated a fair bit of miles on BA, Virgin, and have a bunch of Starwood SPG points I can convert to miles on any airline.
Since a lot of my trips are long weekends and I arrive into London on Monday morning before then going to the office I am very keen to use miles (on BA, for example it is 25k miles I believe) to upgrade from Economy to Business Class on the inbound leg. However, it appears that when booking on a 'discounted' economy seat (as far as I can tell this is basically any economy seat that is not the ridiculous fully flexible £1300 return fare) it is not possible to use miles to upgrade.
Does anyone have advice on which airline allows or is most flexible to use miles to upgrade from a 'discounted' economy seat (i.e., normally ~£350 return from LHR to JFK) on the inbound leg? Am not fussed about upgrading outbound since I don't need to sleep on the Thursday night going out.
Many thanks in advance
Paul.
Well, first, it's got to be an airline that doesn't have a class between Economy and Business on those flights. That obviously rules out BA, because MFU on BA can only go from Economy to Premium Economy, not all the way to Business.
I can't tell you about "most flexible". I can tell you that "allows" is not whole story, but I can answer that one: AA "allows" you to upgrade from just about any fare (that you can buy on their web site, that is; just not "consolidator" fares and such). But: To make up for it, you have to pay a "co-pay" of $350 (I think) in each direction, in addition to the 25000 miles (each direction) for the upgrade. (The co-pay is not charged if your upgrade doesn't go through, so in that sense, it is less expensive than airlines that don't charge a co-pay but require you to buy a less-expensive fare to begin with. But if your upgrade does go through, it may work about somewhat similarly.)
"Unfortunately", you're "only" flying as far as New York. It's the same 25000 + $350 to upgrade all the way to anywhere in the US (one-way), so you're effectively paying more (
relative to how long you get upgraded for) because you're taking one of the shortest trans-Atlantic routes there are (only LHR-BOS would be shorter).
But it's only twice as many miles (and no co-pay and no starting fare to begin with) to get an outright business
award one-way! So if you're paying for it yourself, you may want to do the math on whether it makes more sense to upgrade (with all the limitations, co-pays, etc) or more sense to go for outright awards (in which case you can use the miles you already have on airlines such as BA where the MFU won't work for you).