Originally Posted by saltydog75

You might find this thread helpful:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...rture-tod.html

It'll tell you what people were offered to upgrade from economy to business/first at time of departure (i.e. when you check in). Not sure where you're going (or coming from), but a poster recently noted that a Chicago -> Munich upgrade was $1500 20 hours before departure and went down to $499 90 minutes before departure.

Others can weigh in, but my thought would be: if you definitely want to get out of economy, you might as well go with economy plus now. The price isn't going to go down dramatically in the way a business/first upgrade would, so you might as well lock it in now and be certain you'll get it. On the other hand, if you're willing to roll the dice and go all the way down to the wire, you could get a deal on a business/first upgrade - but then you're risking possibly being stuck in economy if everything else gets taken.

Edit: note that if you're going the latter path and trying to snipe a cheap biz/first upgrade, you'd probably want to do online checkin as soon as it opens up (should be 24 hrs before the flight) and see what price is offered on the "change my seat" upgrade. IIRC you can see the price to upgrade before you finalize your checkin, so you could just start the checkin process every so often to see what the fee is and then back out if you don't want to accept it.