Upgrade given: Y - J
Upgrade location: Check-in desk
Route: FCO-DXB
Flight number: EK96
Type of ticket: Flex
Date of travel: 15/08/14
Tier status: 1 gold 1 silver
Tier miles to date: 60k/33,700
Skywards miles balance:323k/62,975
Number of pax on the same PNR: 2
Skywards DOJ (approx): 2012
And of course the first letter of your surname! H

I booked this trip as a surprise 30th birthday present for my wife. I upgraded the outbound leg DXB-NCE when I first booked the flights when they were first released and left the return leg economy to see whether my wife thought it worthwhile to upgrade for a reasonably short return flight.

Once my wife found out the trip (I managed to get her actually sitting on the plane before telling her!!) she thought it would be a nice end to the tripto upgrade so I set up an alert on Expertflyer 3 weeks before the return leg. No alerts were triggered and no availability showed either on EF or MMB.

A friend checked the load the day before and saw it was 10 overbooked with 5 staff booked also so we thought we may have a good chance of a freebie but still kept checking for availability.

We got to check in where there was a guy in front of us who appeared to be homeless and was stood with his backside hanging out, and was causing a bit of a scene. It turned out he had stolen someone's ID and was trying the different airlines to try and get on a flight! The check in agents were very apologetic and kept apologsing for the wait whichwe were fine withand sypathised with them until they managed to call the police and the guy left. Once we got to the check in counter we joked with the lady and said because of all the waiting any chance of an upgrade? She said she could put a note against our names but couldn't guarantee anything which we were fine with then once we handed over our passports she realised we were gold and silver and said oh let me look into this further since you are status passengers. A few minutes later 2 business boarding passes were printed out and she then proceeded to find us 2 seats together!

A brilliant way to end the holiday.

PS it looked like a few people were upgraded to F also since it only had 1 booked in when the load was checkedand a few people who had checked in before us at J counter were sat in F.