Originally Posted by
alserire
Not sure if this is the right thread but rather than start another one I’ll ask here.
Has anyone ever gotten a confirmed two seat upgrade via concierge vouchers? You and a companion conformed at time of booking? Or is the second seat likely to be held by revenue to a few days before. And can you still ring concierge and ask if seats are available?
I hope you mean companion as in someone travelling with you and not a companion ticket, as they're two very different things at Aer Lingus.
The telephone agents are expressly forbidden to tell you if seats are still available because 95% of the time there are none, but they will look at general availability and say "looks great!", giving people the wrong impression.
Seat availability looks like this in a reservations system -
J9 C9 D4 IC RC U1 Y9 (and now we're in economy with all the other letter classes)
In the example above, there is 1 Avios seat available in U, nothing in R class, nothing in I class (the C denotes "closed (for sale)" - no seats left), 4 at the D class price, 9 or more at the C class price and 9 or more at the J class price.
If you call up and say, "Are there many seats available?" - they might say yes, adding J, C, D, I, R to get 22 seats. However, the 9 or more could mean there are 20 available in J, you just can't tell. It looks wide open, however there is ONE Avios seat, which will show on the Avios website. Once you take that, the U class bucket is closed and revenue management will assign upgrades to U class based on how the rest is selling.
But surely 22 seats is plenty of availability? Not necessarily. If the flight is tomorrow, yes, it's wide open. If it's three months out, two months out - who knows. They manage capacity tightly to sell almost all seats by the time of departure. It's why they only allocate one or two or whatever to the Avios bucket for redemption.
Also, it's not 22 seats. There could be exactly 10. However, the airline is
willing to only sell 4 at D class price, but will happily sell 9 or more at the C and J class prices.
Therefore, the agents are expressly told not to tell people how wide open the flight is in business class and a person's "chances of an upgrade" because they just haven't a clue. People will always ask, the agents try to be helpful and say yes, looks great, and then people get grumpy because "the agent said there were plenty of seats available, how come my upgrade is not being approved?"
I hope that helps temper expectations and give you a flavour of what the agents see.