Today's webinar about upgrades and awards is being wrapped up.
It was very, very, very basic, going through what upgrades and awards are and all the basic rules. Around 500 viwers. Live chat was avilable, but they decided no to take questions from it, and maybe a good choice as questions were sometimes off the chart.
A few points though
* Waitlist processing starts now at T-30 (moved up from T-10 before)
* Waitlist is not processed before T-30 days
* Waitlist is only processed every 4th day, between T-30 and T-2, so 8 times
* After the first waitlist processing (T-30) is done, and only if the waitlist is then empty, cash upgrades will be offered. Cash upgrades have dynamic pricing, competes over the same availability as the voucher upgrades
* They emphasized that waitlist is always checked first and no other way of upgrading (eg cash) is ever done as long as there is a waitlist (FT'ers know empirically this is not true at least in the past, but they repeated this statement with emphasis)
* Waitlist is open for new entries until T-50h
* Waitlist "Final clearance" T-48h, which will clear waitlist into non-U seats leaving only 1 seat for revenue
* They will never tell how waitlist is ranked or show us where we stand on it, but "tier is a key factor". One example indicated that all lumos clear first, then all Plats, then all golds, with some exceptions
* Rank within tier is partly on booking-date, so if two plats are on waitlist, the one who booked first is ranked higher (in an example where all other ranking factors are the same. They clearly have other factors, they will not tell about)
* Waitlist with more than one passenger on it has a very low probability to clear. If only one seat is released, then any entry with 2+ pax will be skipped in that processing, ie a plat booked at T-360 with 2 pax can be skipped for a single gold booked at T-3 och a cash-upgrader
* I did not hear anything about how waitlisted upgrades rank versus waitlisted awards or how PE->J upgrade ranks vs Y->J
* After final waitlist clearance, if more than one seat is left in J upgrades are available via CS, online and airport. (All channels were said to have the same availability, I'm not sure this is the case IRL)
* Only HEL can do voucher/avios upgrades at airport. Only HEL can do airport-upgrades until "close to departure" due to catering issues
* All airports can do cash upgrades, but outside HEL it must be done "early" or it can be denied due to catering issues.
* They said something to the effect of "upgrade is always a game of chance" indicating they are happy with some voucher-upgrades not clearing
They showed some generic numbers success rates of upgrades, but with little detail so it was mostly an marketing thing. They said 82% of all upgrade requests clear and 60% of the without waitlist. Sonds like very high numbers, but we don't know how many pax never bothers with wait listing at all. Also, Lumos confirmed upgrades don't go via waitlist, so they are all a part of the 82%. Split up into business areas it was clear that shorthaul flights drive up that number. Also, IIRC, only 25% of upgrades are confirmed more than 30 days before travel - this is a really bad number IMO.
Finally, they said they were working on improving the award search but had no timeline for it. So a good thing, but since both awards and upgrades are the same bucket and avilability basically disappears seconds after release, the quality of a serch-enginge matters little.