Originally Posted by
irishguy28
That's not a great strategy...
Upgrading was always hit-and-miss and it makes more sense to redeem outright with miles in the first place. If you are looking to upgrade, once you have committed to a certain date and flight - by buying your ticket - you have no further ability to "move" to a flight where availability may later show up. Unless you have verified with FB that a seat is available for upgrade, at the time of purchase, I would advise against this strategy.
When using miles, you need to be agile and proactive - it is up to you to hunt out the offers and respond accordingly. Paying your money and taking an economy ticket on a certain flight means you have almost no chance of being able to upgrade on that flight, if there isn't a seat available for upgrade right at the moment that you decide to buy a ticket on that flight.
But in view of how FB actually operates now, after the most recent changes, that is an even worse decision. With the new changes to FB, award seats can be redeemed for ever-increasing amounts. As such, there is far far less prospect of seats being made available at the cheapest rates once they are all gone - and these are the seats you need available in order to upgrade!
I would advise you to consolidate all your Skyteam flying in the one account, unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise. Having FB miles to use for upgrades is not a good reason.
I always buy premium economy to guarantee that cabin at a minimum, plus to earn status points with Delta. The FB account I have is from a secondary credit card, a Mastercard, since Delta uses Amex and that is not accepted everywhere. Plus the AF Mastercard offers 3x miles on ALL SkyTeam flights, not just 2 on Delta like Delta's Amex... My flying is already consolidated, but this is just closing the gaps that were still open from before. I cannot pay award miles AND keep status, and I fly almost exclusively with SkyTeam (unless a particular routing just doesn't make sense) so status (this year diamond in particular) is an important factor. Not to mention the rates from PE to business are much more affordable, as stated above the quotes between JFK/CDG in S-class are 15k miles, and flights CDG-ICN/PEK are just 24k miles. Totally within reach after having saved up quite a bit from the Mastercard.
Second, it's certainly not true that an upgrade WON'T open. In fact, I already got one of the flights upgraded 2 months after purchase, I'm just looking for the other one. I have GDS access at work and when I'm in my record I can see the upgrade inventory vs. full award inventory (which as we know AF uses two different forms of O)