Originally Posted by
findark
Members with the same status and fare class are sorted by time of upgrade request, with earlier being better. However, by far the best strategy for an upgrade is to confirm it at booking. Australia has been a plentiful source of R (upgrade) space recently. Use Expert Mode and make sure you only search SFO/LAX-SYD/MEL as standalone segments. IAD-SFO/LAX will not have R space and this will cause the whole trip to show R0 if searched together.
Business Saver awards are much harder to come by, although waitlisting on a day when the flight is R9 is not the worst strategy.
Thank you for your help. This weekend I booked our IAD/SFO/SYD trip, adding Aukland as our departure back to SFO/IAD. I ended up using miles +$147.50 RT for two people in economy. I couldn't pass on - what for me is a great deal - the price. For $147.50 I can suck eggs for 15 hours. However, I'm going to hope for the best and pray that we can gain an upgrade or at least Silver status DOES mean something and we get E+.
Cheers!
Last edited by WineCountryUA; Mar 5, 2017 at 9:38 pm
Reason: repaired quote