Originally Posted by
TWA Fan 1
Very impressive.
The rightful King of Newark is crowned, sbm12 the First (I know that's a little confusing but it sounds more kingly, don't you think?).
Not to get too personal, but do you have a last name that starts with one or more letters from the beginning of the alphabet?
Just wondering if a last name with a lot of A's and B's near the start of the word might confer you some advantage over a Mr. Zyzzyes...
Edited: Did you routinely buy your tickets well in advance?
My last name starts with an M, so I'm not winning that way. For the majority of my Florida trips the tickets were purchased no more than 2 weeks in advance. Only very few were purchased 2-3 days out. So on average it was 6-10 day advance purchase fares. The rest of the trips (IAH, UIO, ATL, ANC) were purchased 1-6 months in advance, but still on very low fares, and the flights that upgraded mostly came through at 5 days out. If anyone boutght their seats after I did they were probably buying a more expensive fare, so they would've received the upgrade ahead of me, assuming they were platinum. I'm sure I was lucky this year, and past performance is no indicator of future results, but this was a good year for me and proof that statistics only mean as much as you want them to, especially when evaluated in isolation and/or without all of the statistics available. I'm sure that CO could run a report on the number of EUA seats granted based on fare class purchased very quickly. I think that it would trend towards higher percentages on the higher pare buckets overall (I know I'd never get upgrades on the transcons or most mid-cons on an X fare), but the bottom of the scale isn't so small a collection of upgrades as to be a statistical anomoly either.
S.