Originally Posted by
misterfuss
I apologize it this has been already asked, but I couldn't find it in a search. My spouse and I are traveling SFO-CDG in April and want to upgrade using miles and copay. There is no availability today. When should I request the upgrade? I want to minimize the time UA has the benefit of the float of my upgrade fees but I don't want to miss out on an early upgrade if inventory opens up. Many thanks for the insight.
As mentioned, you have a substantial chance of missing out on an upgrade if you do not have a request made. If you are already committed to a specific flight, you should request the upgrade now - the float value of a couple thousand dollars for a few months is very small.
Originally Posted by
Hipplewm
When I split my wife always inherits the original PNR and has no status but is always above me on the upgrade list and always upgrades before me
Her name starts with C, mine is W
HIP, C
HIP, W
The only thing I can come up with is alphabetical, but it has been the same story too many times to not be some policy, alphabetical is just ow we term it between ourselves.
One thing is she always gets a lower sequence number than me due to alphabetical probably, so that may be the tiebreak as well
My story for why I've given up trying to understand this... was flying with (no status) GF on an itin whose full unflown PNR was NRT-GUM-TKK-PNI-KSA-KWA-MAJ-HNL-LAX-SFO. GPUs applied for the whole journey, and have cleared on NRT-GUM and some downline segments at this point, but not GUM-TKK-PNI. Check-in for NRT-GUM was done in Tokyo, but I went to the desk at the UC in NRT to get the PNR split so that we could check in for more segments (could not check in online). The agent confirmed that the PNR would split, and checked us in for GUM-TKK and TKK-PNI*. She kept the original PNR and I got the new one, and we showed up on the upgrade lists for the two flights. We were the only two pax on both, but we were in the opposite order (!!). She was before me on the visible list for TKK-PNI, and after for GUM-TKK.
I scrutinized the boarding passes, and all things I could imagine (ticket number, sequence number, names) are identical for the two segments - names are of course the same, the ticket numbers were the same too, and the sequence numbers were n, n+1, n+2, n+3 (forget who was first but it alternated). To add to the irony, I cleared TKK-PNI off the invisible list a few hours later; her TKK-PNI cleared at the gate in TKK.
There were a whole host of weird things about this PNR (it started with GMP-HND on OZ same ticket): it had three tickets for each of us because of the four segments per ticket limitation, and had been hacked together by an agent. But I cannot for the life of me puzzle out how we went on the u/g list in different order.
*This was the end of the first ticket since it had four segments on it: SEL-TYO-GUM-TKK-PNI, and the next segment was not in 24hrs.