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.
You definitely have to be persistent and use the HUCA approach again and again. Over the weekend, I got an email alert from EF that another seat had opened on the last segment I needed, CPT-AMS. I called in right away, and the first agent said there was no Z space.
I then tried Twitter, and they said I couldn't upgrade since I had a KL-coded flight. I asked them to read the notes in my reservation, which said I had purchased the whole itinerary as DL-coded flights, how this one got switched when the outbound was upgraded, and how the KLM desk had approved the upgrade from the now-KL-coded flight when availability opened up. I also referenced my wife's itinerary that had already been upgraded on this same flight. The response was that I had to buy up to a Y fare if I wanted to upgrade, and that the agent who upgraded my wife made a mistake.
I called the diamond line again and this time got a helpful agent who read through all the notes, confirmed with me that he understood them, and found the same Z space available that I saw on EF. He put me on hold while he called the KLM desk, and he said they pushed back a lot on the whole KL/DL coding issue. But he advocated for me per the notes and the previous approval, and got the upgrade confirmed. He earned a JWD certificate.
Overall I'm guessing I called at least a dozen times plus had at least 5 conversations on Twitter, but I'm happy to have 2 confirmed biz seats all the way to CPT and back.