With careful scheduling of flights and use of mileage and paid upgrades, you should be able to keep your spouse in C most of the time, without spending big $$$.
Could you elaborate on this a little bit? How does flight scheduling help get us into business class? As for mileage and paid upgrades, that means using the miles we accrue by flying along with cash to buy upgrades when we get to the airport?
And if you fly 4-6 long flights per year, as someone pointed out, that's a base of 30k miles or more, so with judicious purchases of PQMs along the way, you should get to 1K for much less than that.
How would that play out? I thought PQMs couldn't be purchased and had to be earned by flying.
OP -- if you're trying to get into business class on SFO-SYD or SFO-Europe with status, you'd have to get to 1K and use your global upgrade certificates. There are only 6 of those if you just reach 1K, so you'd have 1.5 of your 4-6 trips covered (for two people, assuming your upgrades clear).
There are no "free" upgrades (i.e. complimentary without using miles or certificates) on the routes that you mention, so even if you get to 1K you and your wife will likely be sitting in coach for most of your travel.
Not good. What would you suggest short of paying full fare for business class? Just upgrading with miles+cash at the airport?
Is there anything like optiontown.com for United? That site just worked great for my wife and I between SF and Copenhagen on SAS.
Are Y-Up fares only for travel within the US and Canada?