Originally Posted by
angra
What is the current best practice for finding & applying upgrades pre-booking? I have a trip to Asia coming up in the fall for which I have very flexible dates, and would like to buy tickets that I can upgrade with my GUC.
Is it: Call DM desk; ask if specific flights have upgrade space; repeat until finding space or giving up; hang up; purchase; call back and request upgrades ?
I'd suggest calling and saying "I wanted to check for GUC space flying to XXX across a range of dates" and see how warm a reception you get. It's a fairly manual process for the agents it seems, and some are more open to aggressively searching numerous dates than others are, so you should be able to get a sense of that fairly quickly, and if they're annoyed by the request you can ask them to check one or two dates and then politely end the call and then try again.
As for specific flights, in my experience their system does seem to show them various connecting options, so for example coming from NY I've asked them to look for any available option NY-Tokyo and that seems to be easier for them than trying to ask them to check DTW-NRT, then ATL-NRT, then MSP-HND etc. I don't know if the system is as creative as some FTers might be if they had the reins (I doubt it searches NYC-HNL-NRT for example) but since you have to buy a cash coach ticket to apply the GUC to, a lot of more creative routings (like those one might try for on an award ticket) could end up costing a lot more for the cash coach ticket anyway.
I'd also plan to call during weekday business hours when there's no major weather disruptions going on anywhere in the US, for the best chances of finding a relaxed agent.