Originally Posted by Roaming Ryan

Just as a heads-up, I managed to uncover some truly impressive website behavior this evening while trying to use GGUs with a companion fare. I was searching for a DEN–SAN–HNL roundtrip and, on the AS website, dutifully selected “Upgrade Certificate” as the upgrade type and carefully chose upgrade-eligible flights—because I enjoy following instructions.

Naturally, on the final payment screen, the outbound magically transformed into an O fare (upgrade ineligible!). Assuming user error, I repeated the entire process two more times and achieved the exact same result. Despite doing everything correctly, the website helpfully down-fared me anyway.

After consulting a friend who is far more fluent in Alaska’s… creative IT ecosystem, we discovered that this only happens when a companion certificate is attached to the search. The workaround? I ticketed the itinerary with the unwanted downfare, called in to manually upfare it, and then went back online to apply the GGUs.

Moral of the story: trust, but verify—especially when your browser is pointed at alaskaair.com.