Happily!

http://i.imgur.com/7R9ifZW.png

bawm

Beautiful.

:D:D:D

Should say: "We are sorry, we have no space available (for you)".

:p

Also received the same "We are sorry, we have no space available" message for a YYZ-HND flight early January. According to ExpertFlyert, the flight is: J9 C9 D9 Z9 P9 R0 O1 E0 N0 Y5 B5 M4 U3 H0 Q0 V0 W0 G0 S0 T0 L0 A0 K0

J seems wide open while PY and Y seem pretty full. Go figure.

Maybe you can only check availability for flights 1 week out?

I think we are part of a price discovery exercise...

AC IT being a little crazy? I wonder if the blocks become available to different services at differing intervals. Would be nice to have an official "flight timeline" for when all the different upgrades from bids, eUp and AP redemptions all occurred.

However a full or almost full seat map does. In this case there were 5 empty seats (all middles) in the very back and about 12 empty ones in the area reserved for Altitude members (until T-24 that is). J was wide open with most seats unreserved (it was showing J9 and even R9 on EF)

YHZ-LHR only operates 4 or 5 times a week and just before Christmas it seemed likely there were a lot of Tango pax on this route who were not prepared to pay for advance seat selection.

As SEMM I figured I would be at the top of the list for an opUp under these circumstances.

The gamble paid off

My next upgrade will be the 8AM tuesday flight on Jan 3rd

Being 40J, it should be a easy kill and I would probably be peeved if I am wait listed then receives the bidding email.

Why does Air Canada need to outsource their upgrading bidding system to Plusgrade?

http://www.plusgrade.com/

Not having to re-invent the wheel? Seriously, would you trust AC IT to implement it instead? Plusgrade has proven itself with other airlines.

Because otherwise it would like dumpster on fireeeee

AC did not outsource. The program belongs to Plusgrade and they signed up the airline customers

.

I think you're arguing over semantics here.

Isn't that what we do here on AC FT? :p

I had an Aeroplan reward booking for YHZ-YYZ. Received an offer to bid. Range was $150-400; I bid $160. Accepted. Flight was J9 R9 before my bid was accepted; J9 R8 after.

At the gate on the day of, the GA scanned my BP and then said, "Hmm. I've never seen this upgrade code before." I mentioned the bidding and she said, "Ohhh. Right."

At the time I bid on the outbound flight I also bid $160 on the return YYZ-YHZ. The range was the same, $150-400. However, I looked at the offer again on the bidding site last night and the range had increased to $245-700. This morning it's $250-700. Flight is J4 R1.

I didn't receive a notification that my bid is now below the current minimum, which would seem like an obvious way to encourage people to revisit the site and up their bids if, like me, they weren't aware that the bidding range changes over time. I'm leaving it at $160 to see what happens.