I'd appreciate advice given the situation I'm in. What I'm trying to do is get my BE upgrade confirmed ASAP with an SWU on a K fare for JFK<->LAX in late February 2012. Here's details (some spurious
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I'm traveling for work on JFK <-> LAX. My wife is coming along, and we're adding some days for vacation. My wife hasn't flown in 10 years, and has developed a bit of a flying phobia. For her first flight, I wanted to make sure she's in BE, so I booked straight-up using FF miles and she's confirmed in seat 1D. No problems there.
Since my flight is for my job (and I didn't have enough FF miles to book myself an BE award ticket anyway), I decided to book a K fare for the roundtrip (reimbursing my company out of pocket for the ~ $200 difference between the cheaper fares) and use an SWU.
I've not been PM for too long, but I'd heard (from a DL phone agent, actually) that using an SWU on a domestic K fare is an automatic upgrade.
Instead, they've got me upgraded wait-listed. I see in My Trips this box first:
JFK -> LAX: DL NUMBER
BUSINESS (Z) | NOT ASSIGNED
STATUS: WAIT LISTED
followed by this box second:
MEDALLION UPGRADE REQUESTED
JFK -> LAX: DL NUMBER
ECONOMY (K): 18D
I've read in other threads that SWU's need to be coded properly to get first on the list. Is mine coded right? Do I need to research further to tell?
Meanwhile, for now, my wife is sitting alone in BE, and annoyed at me that I'm going to be back in coach.
As it stands, there are still 16 BE seats for sale on JFK->LAX and 15 for LAX->JFK (flights in late February 2012). When do those seats get released? Not until day of the flight?
Apart from buying a BE seat outright, is there anything I can do now to confirm a BE? As a lesson-learned, can you tell me what I
should have done?