orbitmic

A 'party of 9 upgrade' sounds quite impressive indeed!! When AF used to upgrade me years ago, they always did it for my girlfriend too, albeit trying to seat us separately a couple of times! I miss Frequence Plus. You just felt more special then...

ambrogz

used to be upgraded as had a royal wing card then stopped flying them cause of abnormal stingy service

and then restarted a bit and was quite lucky and upgraded on 20% of the flights

i really don t like their C class on both short and long hauls - i like the staff though that is usually very happy and witty

ambrogz

we can t expect to be upgraded with no elite card

Brobbel

albireo

OK, to pull out my stats since April 2006:

• 23 paid long haul flights with AF on an AF ticket (most of them TATL, V to K booking class, more K lately);
• 9 operational upgrades;
• 1 courtesy upgrade (authorized by a supervisor for commercial reasons).

So, I certainly won't complain and conversely, this is one of my main motivations to stay with AF (at least as long as I can avoid the dreaded 3x4x3 cabins). The primary motivation, however, remains the certainty to be preassigned a seat in the first row of the coach cabin on 772s.

I must also confess that I often choose the flights I book for their "op-up index" (sort of an attempt to reverse engineer Gaetan's mind). Not too surprisingly, this often means flying out on Saturday evennings (which is actually more convenient for my job), however this strategy seems to works only from CDG, since 8 out of the 9 op-ups have been westbound. At LAX (my main eastbound departure port) things are much less rationalized and it seems that friends and family of the crew and local staff are always served first, whatever their status as a customer. The eastbound upgrade was out of ATL.

Op-ups were also much easier to score when the 772 flew with the OTC cabin... (better PC/Y ratio).

Finally, on the short haul front I keep no statistics but in 2 years of flying about one R/T per month I've been upgraded once (from Y->C bypassing S), for commercial reasons (was rebooked from a cancelled flight). It is probably much easier for the airline to fill the plane and still avoid op-ups with the moving curtain. Not that it matters that much anyway on a short hop, as most of the benefits of a C ticket then are on the ground segment, and available to Plats.

cingrand

10 out of 23 is certainly impressive. Actually building an "op-up index" would be fun...

Still, there is a missing link here, the one that would explain why some of us are getting upgraded pretty regularly, and why otherwise similar plats aren't. Could this have to do with SPMLs ? I hear Gaetan excludes pax w/special meals from its op-up priority lists. But then, we hear all sorts of things...

albireo

That is most likely, as op-ups exist primarily to ease the work of the airline when needed (to check in everybody despite an overbooked flight, avoiding the inconvenience and cost of rerouting customers etc.). And changing the number/distribution of special meals at the last minute would add some operational complexity.

NicolasPARMADff

One miserable Tempo to TempoChallenge upgrade with about 20 return trips MAD-CDG & 1 return long-haul to Japan (and the JAL codeshare Y class seemed like C! for their service).

Check-in online the day before, chose first row in Y.

When entered the plane, saw that curtain had been moved backward, I was in TempoChallenge! (what a change! I'm ironic).

mr.a

Out of so far 64 flights this year with af/kl i have been fortunate to have been upgraded from eco to business with klm 2 times on longhaul flights and 6 times on intra europe flights.

With af i have been upgraded 7-8 times from eco to business intra europe and once on a long haul flight.

Still i don´t understand the system, last time i flew home from new york the flight was overbooked and i expected an operational upgrade but they took 15-20 persons and moved to the business cabin, a bunch of kids etc, that didn´t seem to be platinum holders...

AEpilot76

9 times on AF long-haul (100% success rate) as long as I'm in uniform

henkybaby

10 years KLM, last 3 as Gold Elite. Average 10 long haul returns and 10 short haul returns per year. Got upgraded a grand total of (let me check...) zero times. But to be fair, KLM does not really have a class they can upgrade me to, since I fly J most of the time anyways.

MichielR

I am new to this forum but thought I'd share my experience. I fly about 80 short-haul sections in Economy with AF/KL per year and have been PE since the start of FB (was Royal Wing KL before that). I fly another 30 segments with other airlines including SN Brussels (Privilege Gold since 2005 - for what it's worth).

On my last 14 European flights with KL and KLC in July and August I had 4 upgrades to EuropeSelect. All were a result of flights being overbooked in Y and on all occasions as far as I could tell (it helps to look at the little paper at the boarding gate) KL upgraded their PE and GE passengers.

On the downside, out of these 14 there were also two flights cancelled earlier this month, I suspect due to lack of traffic or the ubiqitous technical problems with the Fokker fleet. I did manage to get compensation from KL for this but not through the 'regular' channels.

I didn't go back and count previous upgrades but the small sample corresponds with my past 10 year experience. Indeed, even on my long-haul holiday flights with KL/AF I got an upgrade 2 out of 8 flights. Indeed, every time when the flight was full. It of course helped that KL decided to use a 767 instead of M11 on both of these .

fokker50

af: once transatl, cdg-jfk
kl: 2 or 3 times from tll to ams (klm cityhopper operated flight, so really almost no difference)

COFF-Platinum

147 flights/331,061 miles on KLM and 21/40,379 on Air France and not a single upgrade ever. That said, the last 5 years all my longhaul except for vacation has been in C.

cfischer

last 5 years: 1 OPUP Y -> C (CDG-BOS), Y -> C (CDG-FRA), Y -> Y+ (FRA-CDG).

Most of my flights are in V-class on AF (or actually DL codeshare lately, which may explain the lack of upgrades).