How to upgrade on latitude flight pass flights after Feb 28, 2018?
 

I booked flights on a latitude flight pass in mid March.
There is upgrade availability, on the dates I am interested in going.
But no upgrade availability on many days (esp weekends) because of various North American March breaks - when people like to go to warm and sunny destinations.

Of course, I know the rate limiting step is the current eupgrades expire Feb 28, 2018 - so trying to upgrade on-line does not work - I get a message that I do not have enough eupgrade credits - which technically is correct - in that I have zero.

I really do not want until the end of this year when I get new eupgrade credits which expire around Feb 28, 2019 - before trying to upgrade.

So is there any way to upgrade right now for those flights.

Ya, you could buy up to J class.

Really, from a FP? Do they just charge you the fare difference? And I am assuming you have to call in.

You can't upgrade this flight until you have eUpgrade certificates that expire in February 2019.

Let me call in, and see my options.

If I can not upgrade until my new eupgrade certs which expire in Feb 2019 are added to my account, then I will have to think of options.

No one should be able to upgrade until they get next years upgrade credits. They should start showing up in Nov. All flights should be open for upgrades unless a lot of J tickets have been sold for that flight.

There are multiple ways, right now, to get credits with an expiry date beyond next February.

The most public is the small business rewards thing. It requires $20k in spend, so every SE should be eligible.

So it's quite easy for someone else to snag an upgrade before the OP gets credits.

CP (I used to fly with that airline before AC took it over) used to give ongoing upgrade stickers valid for a year.

For the longest time, AC would give certs valid until the end of Feb of the following year. A few years ago, AC changed stating threshold certs obtained from Nov 1 onwards are valid until Feb 28 of the following second year.

But AC has promised (at least unofficially) to look at the CP type policy from day 1 that it took over CP.

I crossed the 60K threshold a few weeks ago - if the CP policy had existed, I could have upgraded those flights.

In March between YYZ or YUL and PVR - several flights (especially on weekends) do have business class sold out. Not yet my flights - but I am not optimistic I will be able to wait until I get the eupgrade certs around early Nov 2017, expiring Feb 28, 2019 and successfully upgrade.

AC upgrade credit are issued and expire the same way as their old paper cert. AC old paper cert always expired end of February following year and were never good for 2 year, unless they were issued after Nov 1. Also, CP upgrade stickers were never good for 2 year to my knowledge.

CP upgrade stickers were valid for 1 year after the month of issue. So I had received threshold upgrade stickers in June 2017, the stickers were valid until June 2018.

With my Lat FP experience, I really don't believe you will have a problem upgrading this flight. If you truly want to ensure it, one strategy would be to keep your FP booking and buy a J ticket. Cancel the J ticket at t-48 hrs. You could then grab the canceled seat with your comp UG.

Oops, double post.

There is a problem with that strategy. If the flight overall is sold out or oversold, or if the J class cabin is oversold - refunding 2 J class tickets will not necessarily change J0 availability to J2 availability.

If you look at certain weekends days in March 2018 - certain days have all J class cabins on the rouge flights already sold out!

I don't believe that their programming allows for an immediate and automatic asignment of a seat once a passenger has released it. A manual booking of the seat will work. I also don't believe that they oversell J. I am 90% confident this strategy will work.

I still have some old CP upgrade stickers and they all expire the same day. I was a plat member.