There are a couple of other issues nobody has realized yet...

1. If you book a Latitude fare you can upgrade at time of booking, even if you are not yet in possession of an expected upgrade mailing. You just have to hope that it arrives before your flight.

On the other hand, if they are deposited into your "account" immediately upon reaching the threshold you wouldn't have to worry about the mail.

2. If you go from nothing/Presige (same thing, really) to Elite to Super Elite in the same year, and you select bonus status miles as part of your Elite package, AC has been clawing back those status miles once you reach Super Elite. Now it may be possible to do the same thing with upgrades.

I suppose you could just use them up in advance of reaching Super Elite, but if you select certs as part of your SE package, it would be possible to debit them against your previously issued upgrades. Not saying it would happen, only that it could.

eUpgrade will effectively prevent booking when one is not yet in possession of the eUpgrade.

At the moment, even if I have only 2 cert left, I can book in February and request upgrade for 2 trips in April and June so long as I know that I shall be crossing a threshold in April for the next set of cert. to arrive before my June trip. I can "lock in" my upgrade while R space is available in February. I shall not be able to do that any more. I shall have to wait until April for the threshold eUpgrade to be credited into my account before I can book my June trip. For me, it's an inconvenience and hopefully the R space will still be there when I am able to book.

Realistically, though, Lise doesn't do -- or even manage directly -- any of this by herself. I expect that her responsibility would cover the IT strategy, and hiring/managing the next layer of IT management.

Whether or not the mid-management in AC IT has improved any, and can pull this project off (or whether the work was outsourced) is something that we'll have to wait to find out.

Exactly... and the same is true at the start of the year. We will all not receive our 2011 certs until March 1 instead of them usually arriving in the mail Mid January. That's a big deal to me and possible others who might have saved some certs for January and February had they known our packages would be delayed almost 2 months.

We might actually receive the eUpgrades earlier -- not known yet. But (this year) they won't be usable on flights that depart before 01 March.

Which is a problem if you depart in February and are planning on returning in March. I've got a YVR-SYD flight which I am a little concerned about now.

Actually, it might be a smart move from AC, from a business perspective, to set things up such that you actually can confirm an upgrade even if at the time you don't have an eCert, but to pull the cert later, together with the flight coupon.

This said, that this might be a smart move obviously does not necessarily mean that it's the way they'll do it.

OTOH I don't recall having confirmed an upgrade without having the cert at hand. Except possibly when dealing with year crossover.

Which is a huge loss! The certs had an expiry date, but did not have a start date. They could be used as soon as you got them in your hands.... Usually mid January...

I know I might sound like I'm repeating myself, I guess I'm hoping an AC lurker might be reading and might not have taken this into account and how it will effect many flyers.

Wishful thinking:

Maybe AC just wanted us to start discussion here so they won't be committing the same mistake as they did a while ago when they banned Es from taking the front row of priority seats as they introduced preferred seats. They don't want to make any changes that would cause an uproar of their best customers and have to retract the changes later.

Based upon the thread I had started earlier (link: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/air-c...confirmed.html), I would like to ask Andrew Yiu that if I have already purchased tickets (latitude fare) for flights scheduled after Mar 1, when is the earliest I can try to upgrade these flights.

The problem here is that this is not just an FF Program question -- for the first year of eUpgrades, this depends on the IT infrastructure being fully implemented and tested. If it's not going to be ready before late February (I really don't know here, I am simply guessing) then they wouldn't be able to enable the eUpgrades earlier even if they wanted to.

Doesn't the e-mail mention December though?

For "managing" eUpgrades, yes (not sure what kind of managing we'll all be doing with them for the first two months). But beyond that, the processing of eUpgrades for flights still needs to be implemented.

And by not enabling eUpgrades until 01 March, they avoid one problem: having to deal with both eUpgrades and paper certs at the same time for two months (both from IT and human perspective).

But as I said earlier, I have no insider knowledge, I am simply making semi-educated guesses.

The most interesting part of the announcement for me was this:
"And no matter how you completed your booking, you can request upgrades to Executive Class® or Executive First® on aircanada.com."

I am forced to book my travel through a corporate travel agent, and to be honest I don't trust that they are processing my upgrade requests as diligently as I would. I interpret from the sentence above that I'll be able to now get in line for upgrades at the four-day mark on my own via aircanada.com. For me, that's a huge improvement.

Pete

I think you still got this wrong.

Surely they must have eUpgrades enabled from the moment they release next year's program. So for the period Jan-February, they'll have to have both systems working concurrently. Which is what I read in the statement whereby the system will be enabled in December.

In other words, their system supposedly must be ready to go already. Of course the extent to which that is actually the case we'll find out once they open for business...