Originally Posted by jrkmsp

Completely sure — I just did it from Dulles this week. But I can also confirm that at least 50 % of the SkyMiles agents you'll talk to are idiots and won't know how to do it.

The steps to take are look at Delta.com and see if there's a Virgin Atlantic Upper Class award ticket available on your flight. That's the key — you need upgrade availability on the Virgin flight, and Virgin treats award and upgrade availability the same. So if there's an Upper Class award seat available on your flight, there should be an upgrade available.

Once you've established there's a seat, you call the Medallion line and tell them you'd like to upgrade. The semi-magic words are to remind them to look at availability on the Virgin flight number. So, in my case, I booked DL-coded flights MSP-IAD and IAD-LHR, and then I asked them to look for upgrade availability on VS22 — the VS flight number for IAD-LHR. Voila, the third agent I spoke to found the availability and I was confirmed into Upper Class. PE was $50 cheaper than regular economy and I will be flying it in Upper Class for an additional 25,000 miles.

Good luck!