Originally Posted by
Marcella Reidl Whitfield
So we've got on the call with the platinum line today. Trying to go from CHS to CDG. not terribly hard, right? We are using Pay with Miles. I asked the agent to find ANY available in September/October 2019 for 14 days with instant upgrade only on the transatlantic flts with GUC to Delta One. She could find a single day Oct 7th going over but nothing coming back. She encouraged me to go ahead and book because its common for GUCs to clear at the last minute. Is this so? I wanted to get some feedback to see if this is accurate and if gambling with our GUCs on one leg is a chance we should take. This isn't really prime travel time, is it?
The other thing that kills me is that we actually are trying to go from CDG to LJU (Slovenia). If we were to forgo using the GUCs and just use award miles, this trip for the same timeframe is listed as 50,000 miles as an award in Economy right now. If we drop off the leg to Slovenia it jumps up to 77K miles, but we can't use pay with miles on the trip through LJU because that leg is by Adria. I wish there was a points/award/travel consultant that specialized in booking flights for folks with GUCs.
Delta tends to make upgrade space available closer to departure, so it's very possible that some flights you're not seeing space on now would become available later on. But, hard to know which ones exactly in advance, and while Sep-Oct is not the busiest travel period, it is a busy time for business travel when the front cabin is more likely to be full and upgrades less likely to clear.
Of course, if you wait to book your coach ticket until a month or two out, when there might be more visibility of global upgrade space, you'd probably have to pay a lot more for the coach ticket.
Best bet is to avoid busy business travel days (Sun-Mon and Thu-Fri) as much as you can, if you're going to take a risk by booking something and hoping the upgrade will clear.