FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Wow - selling the upgrades at the gate so explicitly.
Old Jan 14, 2018, 7:45 am
  #309  
jsloan
FlyerTalk Evangelist
 
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 21,186
Originally Posted by zombietooth
Is this unusual, because it appears to be in conflict with your, "anytime in the reservation listing", statement?
No. Buy-ups for the entire trip are available at any time via Manage Reservations. Buy-ups for a single leg of the trip are not.

You were correct that a time-of-purchase upgrade would not have counted for PQDs. However, there's really nothing you can do in the situation you describe in order to get a PQD-earning buy-up. In order to earn PQDs, you would need to be able to book into a domestic first class fare. However, combining that with your existing R space would have required a fare break at the international gateway. So, suppose you were traveling ABQ-SFO-NRT and back. Your fare was almost certainly priced as ABQ-NRT. In order to do a PQD-earning buy-up, UA would have to have a domestic first class fare ABQ-SFO that was combinable end-on-end with an SFO-NRT roundtrip fare. Many UA international fares are not, especially if they're at any kind of discount.

So, instead of a $139 buy-up that didn't earn PQDs, you likely would have been faced with a $2K buy-up that did.
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