Originally Posted by
uitailgater
Update: I've been watching EF for CPT-AMS availability on its own, as well as overall CPT-MDW. Today, searching just CPT-AMS, 1 seat showed available. I sent a DM to the Twitter team. They could see the 1 seat available that was showing in EF for the CPT-AMS route. They split our reservation and were able to upgrade my wife successfully. I've set an alert on EF and will keep watching for one more seat to open up.
So in this case at least, with part of the route operated by KLM and part by Delta, I needed to find availability searching just on the KLM-operated portion of the route by itself. On the outbound (ORD-AMS-CPT), I had to find availability on the route as a whole since it was all operated by KLM. This does match the way the reservation shows on klm.com. There it shows 3 segments: ORD-CPT (2 flights operated by KLM), CPT-AMS (1 flight operated by KLM), AMS-MDW (2 flights operated by Delta), even though I bought it as a round-trip and just have a 2 hour connection on the return.
I had called the Diamond line a few days ago to ask about changing the KLM-coded flight back to the DL codeshare, since they had changed it when they upgraded the outbound. They couldn't change it back, but they were able to confirm with the KLM desk, and put a note in my record, that the upgrade would be approved if available since I had originally purchased the codeshare. This helped today, because the first response on Twitter was that the flight wasn't eligible for an upgrade since it was a KLM flight number not in Y/B/M. After they read the notes in the record, there were no issues with confirming the upgrade.
Interesting data point.
I will say, I booked a NY-ORD-AMS-South Africa ticket with the longhaul flights on KL, and was able to upgrade after finding EF showing upgrade space on ORD-South Africa only (since EF doesn't show NY-Chicago-Amsterdam-South Africa as a routing). So perhaps on mixed DL/KL itineraries you do need to find KL space on the isolated KL flights?
That said I have seen counterexamples on routings that do show up on EF where adding domestic DL legs to an international KL trip appears to make the KL space disappear -- but then again, in those cases EF was showing me the domestic DL legs with KL flight numbers on them, so that is not necessarily the same as what happens when you mix DL and KL flight numbers, as would happen if GUCs were applied to an itinerary with some DL-operated legs and some KL-operated legs.