Originally Posted by
stingray300
If your flight is in early sept the back-to-school crowd might work in your favour. They'd almost guarantee an overbooked Y and I think most of them aren't MPC.
Overbooked: Yes.
However, you'd be surprised how many students have SL/GO status or even higher. If they travel home 3 times a year, it's not difficult to maintain status. When I was based in US for studies, I was able to maintain SQ*G annually without any difficulty just by making trips to and from home.
Depends though. On a recent flight I took ORD-HKG, most of the students were mainlanders and not HK people and the vast majority did not seem to have any FFP associated with their booking as their BPs did not show it.