Originally Posted by
pgh234
I am a very newly minted Gold with $40.1k LPs who scored an upgrade DFW-PVR on 7/5 with a basic economy fare. There were 12 people behind me on upgrade list with no one on standby list. Help me make sense of this
I am coming to AA side from DL
Originally Posted by
JJeffrey
Flying over the 4th of July weekend can be an upgrade goldmine.
That. Upgrades can just be incredibly day and time specific and highly variable from market to market. As posted above, I (Plat with far fewer LPs than 40K) recently was upgraded well in advance on a PHX-DFW flight when on the same itinerary I did not clear STS-PHX on an E75 with a very very generous F:Y seating ratio.
I always buy first when I need/really want to be in first. And I am usually good at predicting ahead of time when I will or will not be upgraded, when a flight will or will not go out full (I once did this for a living, after all) But even with that, every once in a while I have wound up buying a paid F ticket and wound up with an empty seat next to me in F on a hub-to-hub flight (CLT-DFW)
This thread is really just a collection of anecdotes with minimal predictive value. Other than the patently obvious like you will almost never get upgraded DFW>NYC/PHL/WAS/ATL on a Monday morning or NYC/PHL/WAS/ATL>DFW on a Thursday afternoon, visit this thread for entertaining anecdotes rather than predictive analytics.