Originally Posted by
DCA-SEA
Since I'm a government traveler out of Seattle, I use AS/QX on government fares for virtually all of my travel.
In my experience, AS doesn't treat government fares as fully equivalent to full Y fares, but it does allow changes with no change fees.
My agency doesn't ticket reservations until 3 days before travel, and AS doesn't put elites on the comp UG waitlist until tickets are ticketed. The practical effect is that even though I can get UG'd 48 hours in advance as an MVP, usually there's no U space left and I'm at the end of the waitlist.
So, I typically only get UG'd at non-peak times for elites. I have, however, used the ability to freely change flights on busy routes (eg SEA-ANC, SEA-LAX) to change my reservation to an earlier or later flight that still gets me where I need to go, and has U space at <48 hours, to snag a UG.
Up until a few years ago I was flying quite a bit on the SEA-IAD (redeye) and the SEA-DCA on government fares and found this to be the same. Luckily, my tickets were purchased routinely as my time requirments were fairly routine and I was able to get the 48 hour upgrade every now and then (would have been MVPG 75K during those years...damn) but as the above post laments.....there are very few upgrades available.