Originally Posted by cigarman
There are four windows. At about 90 days out the seats open up for platinums. At 60 days they open for gold. At about 30 days they open foe Silver, if you have no status then the window opens at about 14 days. If you are already within your window, often you can call and find flights with the seats avialable. They simply are capacity controlled to haow many free ones they give out. Just like, AA, DL, UA and the other airlines.
Wow - this is news to me. I thought Intl BF upgrades came only out of "R" inventory. If there is R inventory, anyone should be able to book it, right? Are there now 4 sub-classes of R inventory (like the expanded-availability on reward tix for Platinums)?
I can see rev mgmt only releasing enough R inventory for the number of elites on the waitlist at the relevant "window", but that would preclude anyone within their window calling and finding upgrade inventory available, unless there's some mechanism to release R inventory on a real-time basis when requested by the elite within the window.
Can you explain the deal here? It just doesn't make sense and CO.com doesn't mention anything about these windows being some sort of "official" restriction on upgrades. ("I'm sorry, there is upgrade availability but since you're only Silver, we can't upgrade you until at most 30 days before the flight").