Originally Posted by
britchick64
If this reply was to me thank you. I checked in at T-24, no upgrades available. Checked the flight, it is sold out save for a couple seats. Literally changed in an hour so im suspecting AC cancelled another half full flight and bumped everyone onto one plane. Id checked the status of seats just an hour prior to this so was a tad shocked.
there are just a couple seats in Y and 2 left J. Id love to upgrade hubby who is currently working night shift so little sleep before flight but have been told AC will not upgrade just 1/4.
never upgraded before, or tried to, had a go, didn’t pan out for me, theres always a next time
reading threads on here it seems sometimes it works sometimes it does not.
1. Belated welcome to flyertalk, britchick!
2. Indeed, the instant ups and LMUs are all or nothing, so if you have an itinerary of 4 pax (passengers), you'll only be offered an LMU at T-24 if there's 4 spots available.
3. As per billdokes if there was only J4 available, they likely were not going to give all 4 to LMU. Not that I have a ton of samples in my dataset, but my personal experience suggests if there was J4 for example, they would only offer J2 for LMU. So in your case with 4 pax, you'd have a low chance of receiving an LMU at T-24 online check-in (OLCI).
4. When you say that the flight suddenly sold out, are you referring to the seat map, or did you actually check availability on ExpertFlyer (EF)? If you checked the seat map then that's misleading -- at T-24 when the OLCI starts, AC will auto assign seats to everyone. So everyone who didn't pre-select a seat suddenly gets one, and the seat map fills up instantly, creating the visual "illusion" of a "suddenly full plane". This is why most of us on FT always say to check EF for true availability.
If people have last minute cancellations in J (which is usually unlikely), then between T-24 to T-4, if a J seat frees up, then in theory they might offer it on LMU if you check your OLCI dashboard. That said, with your 4 pax, you'd need 4 seats in J to open to get an LMU.