A pretty newbie question:
I made GLD on my very last flight of 2014, and this gives me a tingly feeling. It's my first time ever having status.
Having booked a flight for March, I did wonder how the following benefit worked.
* Upgrades for Flights under 500 mile,
According to AA:
for GLD, PLT and EXP.
However, when I scroll down manage my booking, where one segment is AUS-DFW, I see "request upgrade" N/A. I picked a good preferred seat for free, just to be sure, but how does the upgrade process go. Will I just get a note that my upgrade went through at T-24? Will I be able to pick a seat then, or just get a random First seat assigned?
What if, for example, there's no window seat available in First, can I still pick an economy seat?
Another, unrelated question. Booking through the AA-site, I was offered a routing LHR-DFW. However, on ITA, I could find a routing LHR-MIA, that was 20 euro cheaper, and would give me more miles to boot. Now, the money and miles were not worth the extra flight duration this time around, but I can imagine a desire to optimize miles in the future.
My assumption would be that in order to get that routing, I should have booked by phone and insisted on booking the flights as given by ITA? Or is there a trick to force routings online? Would I have to pay a phone booking fee, or would that have been waived since I couldn't book that routing on-line?
Thanks in advance, and apologies for asking these somewhat basic questions.