This factlet starts four days out from my flight back to London (more specifically, the DXB-LGW sector - which is obviously after the PER-DXB) I get a text message followed by an email from Emirates.

'An upgrade is available'. An upgrade is now available for all passengers on the following flight in your booking xxxxxx. Visit Upgrade with Miles now to avoid disappointment.

So first, the IT fail. Tried to log in to my account and upgrade. There's an alert on the Manage Booking page (top right, above Passenger Preferences), telling me to 'click here', and another option to upgrade with miles through the normal booking channel. What do you think happened when I selected either option? Of course, it didn't work! Now I had previously upgraded the outbound sector using miles, and that rendered the upgrade with cash option completely functionless. The mileage function looked like it would still work, but it didn't (see below).

So, I phone them, and here's the magic bit. I explain the situation, the guy asks which flight I'd like to upgrade, so I say well the offer I received was for the DXB-LGW flight, but ideally both of them. And imagine my surprise when he says that both flights are available. A few taps and a couple of apologies for the delay later and I'm in First and my seats are being assigned.

Keep in mind that no availability appeared thorough the Emirates website and no availability appeared on Expertflyer (no notification to date). I did test the Expertflyer alerts on a flight that I knew had availability and that alert worked.

I definitely think there was a chance of an op-up on one flight - DXB - LGW I think, but the PER - DXB I think was pretty unlikely. And upgrading both flights is better than upgrading a single sector. It's 78k miles for the PER - LGW flight, but about 62.4k for PER-DXB and 39k for the DXB-LGW (Business Saver fare). I didn't fancy buying the extra miles, and whilst I did have auto-upgrade on, I thought better of it as the F cabin was so empty - had one of the flights F cabins been full I might have taken a different approach.