Originally Posted by
donotblink
You can see instantly confirmable systemwide upgrade space on the American Airlines website while you’re searching for flights. If you have a systemwide upgrade in your account, it will show a special link to show you that system wide upgrades are available from one or more flights that you’ve searched for in the results page. That being said, it will be very time-consuming and laborious to search that way.
That's how I've done it in the past, but it's been a year or more since I did. It actually wasn't too bad those times I've done it that way, or I got lucky that I had workable options in the range I was looking. I just didn't have a good sense of whether it's now harder to lock something in versus a year or two ago.
Originally Posted by
Antarius
It is doable without EF, but it takes more work. EF is a lot faster and allows you to search routes quickly.
It might be worth going ahead and spending some time getting to know it.
That said, are you willing to waitlist or are you a clear-on-booking person? That can drive some decision making.
That's a good question. I'd prefer the certainty of having it locked in; while I'm flexible now in the dates and itinerary, once I book the hotels and whatnot, I'd be more tied to those particular dates and it would be a shame not to confirm the SWU for a flight we've built the trip around. We'll only be taking this one international trip this year I think, so it's pretty important to lock them in if we're going to go the SWU route.
The easiest routes to clear a SWU, IME, are CLT-MUC, JFK-BCN, CLT-MAD, DFW-FRA and one of the non-peak JFK-LHR flights. A Tuesday DFW-LHR should also be a guaranteed clear, albeit will have to waitlist.
Of those, I think the DFW-FRA would make the most sense for us, coming from PHX and aiming for Germany or Austria. I have some friends in Hessen, and I kinda know the area from when I was stationed there back in the 90s so Frankfurt would be the most logical port.