Originally Posted by
speede racer
Looking for advice, hoping to maximize my chances of ending up with a happy story for this thread.
I asked twitter to apply an upgrade certificate to DL 1 LHR -> JFK on Dec 7. The certificate is applied and wait-listed, and looks not unpromising -- 5 unclaimed seats and at least 3 still for sale.
The tricky bit is that the certificate is set to expire on the 5th, two days before the flight. So should I try and 'get an extension', or hope for the best? My thought is that it could clear before it expires on the 5th, and that would be ok, or maybe the system says 'yep, there's a certificate applied so I'll use it regardless of expiration date'. Alternatively, when the certificate tries to clear, either before the 5th or after, the system will detect that the certificate is expired on day of travel and I'll be out of luck.
Not a lot you can do unfortunately. In theory if the cert clears before expiration, it can be processed. I am not sure whether you will automatically be dropped from the upgrade list if it doesn't clear before expiration -- the good news is that if it doesn't clear before expiration, it would almost certainly clear only at the gate (if at all), and so there's a chance you may still appear on the upgrade list and get upgraded by the gate agent, not realizing that the cert is expired; I'm not sure how much "research" the gate agents do on whether everything is in order when they are running through the upgrade list before departure, but it definitely helps that Virgin staff process day-of-departure upgrades at LHR (since VS staff serve as gate agents for DL flights departing LHR) -- a while back I got an upgrade at departure on LHR-JFK and didn't have a cert deducted at all, presumably due to the Virgin staff missing a step in the process.
I suppose it is also further complicated by the fact that technically you would owe more APD if the upgrade clears, though again I'm not sure that this is paid much attention once on the airport upgrade list -- I didn't pay the APD on my one data point, which admittedly was a few years ago and relatively early in the DL move to LHR T3 so things may have gotten more sophisticated since then.