Originally Posted by AZ Travels the World
I know several PHX-based gold members who fly exclusively during the week, for business, to business centers like DFW, DEN, ORD, SJC, BOS, EWR and others. Based upon the feedback of several of them, their upgrade success this past year is roughly one-third of what it was a year ago. These are the routes and flights on which HP is selling those discounted first class seats and upgrades. In many cases they are not upgraded during their upgrade window, call HP and are told that the airline is holding seats for sale, which includes people willing to pay to upgrade.
This is counter to what HP appeared to promise when they established this pay-for-upgrade program. They changed the upgrade window for Silver members, if you recall, so that all elite upgrades could be completed before offering the pay-for-upgrades at 30 hours out. What they didn't say is that they would be holding back some of those seats from elite members in order to sell them in this program. I know two specific instances where Gold members were denied elite upgrades but were offered the option of purchasing them. Others here have reported the same.
I've not flown on other airlines with any status before so I want to ask is this something that other airlines do or don't do with their elites? Coming up to the first of the year, my company will let us switch carriers without much of a hassle and being platinum (only going to be gold next year though) I've been pretty sucessful getting upgrades but have run into the 2 seats left for paying customers but no upgrades available currently. Do other airlines like Northwest, Continental, AA, etc do this as well as an industry practice or is this just something that HP is doing. I totally understand the whole pay before free thing but if another airline doesn't do it. I know other airlines are higher prices in a lot of cases but we bill customers the cost of the ticket so it's not a big deal to charge X dollars to the customer for a coach ticket but charging near that amount for a first ticket on HP isn't acceptable. So I have to make a decision to stay with HP or go to another airline to build my status there if they don't have this holding back for sale thing.
Thanks,
Lance