Wildwoody

i have the same question. I called and the agent said it would be 30k miles but was not available. I tried to press to see if it was only show not available because I didn’t have the 30k miles in my FB account, but could easily transfer it in from Amex.

anyone know if there is a way to upgrade from premium to biz before check in?

IstKong

CDG-JFK

Had a full flex Y ticket. FB Gold Status. Was upgraded for free to Premium Eco 4h before departure (was already checked-in, got a new seat). Had an offer to upgrade to J for 43000 miles. Took it.

SDQBound

Yes, by paying the ticket difference.

SDQBound

Does anyone know for how long are you usually banned from the offers? I posted my experience from last November where the ticket agent first told me a price from the chart and then the computer asked her to charge me more. It's been already 5 years since my last one, wouldn't that record be gone due to GDPR requirements?

David7

Upgraded a Business ticket to La Premiere using 75.000 miles (regular upgrade in advance).

The agent doing it apparently screwed it up by reissuing my ticket only for the upgraded flight.

When trying to get this fixed they insisted the upgrade wasn’t available for my flight so I would be put back in Business in order to reinstate my original itinerary. I didn’t want this but they just sent me a downgraded ticket and are refusing to do anything even though the upgrade was already ticketed. (Not my problem as a customer if an agent tickets something incorrectly?)

Of course they credited me back the miles but I these were transferred from Amex only for this purpose.. Use caution when doing these upgrades in advance as the level of incompetence is staggering.

Goldorak

5 years means you are not in purgatory but in hell forever . Seriously, the purgatory period lasts usually a few weeks to a few months, depending on your travel pattern (those are just educated guess as no one knows exactly how the algorithm works).
Note that you don't necessarily receive an offer by email (I very rarely receive those), but if an offer is available to you, you can see the upper class seat map during OLCI. You have also to take into account that J cabins are very full with regular bookings, so paid upgrade proposals are less frequent. This is true even in Europe. I was very surprised to see for all my last EU flights a large J cabin (6-7 rows) totally full and even for "low yield" destinations like PRG.

SDQBound

Not sure if I went on an upgrade spree and they banned me for life then I have never received an offer via email, I aways see them at the seat map during OLCI.

When I was based at CDG (left almost 5 years ago), I would routinely receive such upgrade offers for short routes such as FCO, GVA, AMS, DUS but I only took a few just to test the business product since they were cheap (usually 49-79 Euros). Then took a JFK-CDG offer and since then, I always get the very high price, no matter if it's a DL codeshare or a AF flight number / ticket stock

I mentioned upthread back in November that the IAD check-in agent offered me an upgrade for a much lower price than what I saw during OLCI but then she said "Oh, the system is telling me to charge you more" and could only offer me the original OLCI price.

Wildwoody

so this can be done with points?! Or with cash? Sounds like I need to find the right agent as they were implying it was impossible. I just want to confirm before transferring the points to do it.

SDQBound

You can pay cash, it will be the price difference between Economy and Business. For miles, there needs to be upgrade inventory for them to process the upgrade, so calling multiple times will not do the trick as they will not be able to upgrade you if there is no inventory in the upgrade fare class (Back in the day you needed space in "O" fare class but things might have changed and I have not kept track of these changes). Not having enough miles in your account doesn't hinder the agent's ability to look at the upgrade availability for your flight.

Keter

Going to fly a red eye DXB-CDG on AF in Y for the 3rd time and want to do my best to upgrade it to J. The current flight situation is that business award is sold cheaper than economy award seats (60k miles vs roughly 120K) but upgrades seats in J (OZ class as i understand) are not available. The flight is in September. Any hints when OZ upgrade inventory might open up?

BobTL

difficult to say. Depends on how many seats they will sell in cash before departure.
when there are seats left you will get a miles/cash offer upon online checking in. This will highly likely be more than 60.000 miles looking at this thread. Depends on your history of taking advantage of such offer, your fare class on the Y ticket and timing. The longer you wait after OLCI taking the offer, the more likely it will increase in price. I haven’t seen any reports of the price getting lower after the first OLCI offer.

offvoice

It sounds like you have a mention on your passenger profile : “DNPU” or something similar (can’t remember the exact term). It’s essentially a system-wide tag that applies to your profile and decide whether to charge you a lot or not on upgrades (or even to make them available to you or not).

If you call nicely explaining you’re tired of being offered upgrades that don’t make sense and that there is no chance you’d take them at that price, they might agree to remove it. I successfully did it twice with the Platinum line in France. Worth asking.

Arpoador

NDPU. No Discount on Paid Upgrades

Wildwoody

Thanks for the insight. They insisted that cash wasn’t an option. I’ll have to try back.

Goldorak

Very good advice. I did that too some months ago after...I don't know...more than 6 months in purgatory. I was with the Ulti TA for another matter and I took this opportunity to tell them that I was tired to receive those non-sense paid upgrade proposals at 300+ Euros for EU flights and that I will never buy this so they can stop to propose that to me. I even mentioned that I suspected I had this NDPU mention in my profile. It works as, for the next trip, I received a decent paid upgrade offer