Pardon the rambling question, but I always go to the FT pro's for my difficult travel quandaries.

I am tired of flying coach from the US to Aus for work, and am going in a month.

I stumbled into a 70k miles saver/Polaris seat on the ride home, so that leg is taken care of.

The dilemma is my first leg over the pond.

Currently no saver awards available, but plenty of discount economy fares/miles options from about every airline. My question lies in the gray area.

I normally fly Delta, and use Virgin for the long haul so that i get the best economy seat for value.

But reading around it looks like the cash ticket+ miles/cash upgrade option from polaris is almost guaranteed to hit. I am here for confirmation/rejection of that notion.

Currently on the 2-3 days i could fly over (Thanksgiving-saturday) there are roughly 25-30 business seats open on each trans pacific flight. But no saver fares available. So. The option i have is to buy a united seat $1100 +/- and then do the $600+30kmiles for polaris upgrade.

Should i do this? or is there a different route people would recommend?

Cheers,

Luke