Originally Posted by
dwugson
For those of you who have flown on the JFK - Delhi non-stop flight any personal experiences (positive or otherwise) in getting an upgrade from premium economy to business? Am flying at the end of January, think it's well beyond the peak travel time but how often is business totally full? I am exec plat, already requalified so assume I have a reasonable current mileage and would be using a SWU. Based on this assume I would be well placed on the upgrade request list.
Any insight would be much appreciated.
Keep in mind that there is no difference (at all) in upgrading from PE to business as opposed to upgrading from regular economy to business. So unless you really just want to pay the extra for PE (or someone else is paying for it), just grab a good MCE seat for now and hope your upgrade clears.
I just did a roundtrip (booked BOS-JFK-DEL roundtrip for $735/person, 3 passengers -- ended up flying PWM-LGA / JFK-DEL roundtrip after taking advantage of a schedule change).
On the outbound, it looked real bad - every flight was selling out in J and F (down to F0J0 and a full seat map) a few days in advance. But I watched each flight on the app and 1-3 seats were clearing most days with some apparent last-minute change-ups (i.e. passengers switching flights or misconnecting). We got very lucky and, about 30 hours before our outbound flight, a bunch of seats popped open (and it went from J0 to J7), and I cleared along with one of my companions before it went back to J2. My other companion cleared at the gate (and 6 ended up clearing due to some misconnects). That was a Wednesday night a few weeks ago.
For the flight back JFK-DEL, also on a Wednesday, we cleared the SWUs at booking several months in advance. The flight ended up being wide open in all cabins.
I chose seats 12J, 13J, and 13G both ways and it was a good part of the cabin to be in -- very low foot traffic/noise but easy access to the lav behind 15J.