11/09/16
NZ46 AKL-RAR
Y-PE (777-200)
AP$150 (no status)
Accepted 4 days out

[on behalf of parents]

NZ103 AKL - SYD
Y - PE
$100 accepted 5 days out.

23/09/16
NZ119 AKL-SYD
Y-PE (789)
NZD$110 + 10% Silver uplift
Declined 3 days out

Got a kind friend to put in an Elite APD upgrade to J for me after my OneUp was declined and that was confirmed at T-7 hours.

26/09/16
NZ108 (766)
Y - > J
Bid APD$220 + 10% Silver
Declined 3 days out despite quite good availability on EF

Hello:

DH and I are traveling LAX-AKL in PE. Would like to bid for an upgrade to BC, but need to put in a bid for both seats. Does that work very well--i.e. is there a better chance if it is a request for two seats as opposed to bidding for one at a time? It's on a mid week flight.
Thank you

You're at the bottom of the barrel for upgrade paths, and there's typically very high loading in the forward cabins to/from USA, so don't get your hopes up. You'd want to bid on both together.

In fact, if you're on the same PNR, you'll have to bid for both together...

I'm waiting to find out how I go on AKL-SFO next Monday now. My bid of $560 per pax is below the new minimum ($A600) and not surprisingly I was invited to bid more. However, there are still 16 J seats free (plus 2 greyed out for HVCs)...

(SFO-AKL is a wipeout because J on my 772 flight on a Wednesday in late October is full.)

This has been mentioned/discussed many times.

Unselected/"free" seats on an NZ seat-map doesn't mean there's X amount of seats available. Just means it's unselected, which happens more often than you think and it should fill up by 24-48hrs time just prior to your flight going to airport control.

Also, there are no "HVC" (or Preferred) section on NZ J.
Any NZ Gold/Elite sees the same seatmap as anyone else in the J cabins, which is to say, any J seat is as good as any.

The 2 greyed out seats in J are blocked for airport control/on-the-day assignments.

I know, but even allowing for unallocated seats for ticketed J passengers, RUs, APD upgrades and the long list of everyone else ahead of OneUps in the upgrade queue, the chance of getting upgraded is (I imagine) still quite reasonable when the cabin is only just over half allocated 6 days out (there are in fact 18 seats unallocated, not 16; I miscounted). Certainly better than my forthcoming SFO-AKL flight where all bar 2 seats were greyed out or allocated when I last checked.

Anyway, all will be revealed in the next day or two I suppose...

Interestingly, I am booked into a greyed out seat for one of my flights, reflecting that the metal changed from a 773 to a 772, at which point I changed seat. It then changed back again, leaving me in a greyed out seat.

I would imagine on-the-day assignments would be more likely to go to elites, all other things being equal...

Thank you for your help.
Next Question: Once we have paid for our tickets and confirmed our seats in PE, what is the next step for making the upgrade bid--what do we do next?

Log into myairnz and click on the upgrade button next to your booking.

Thank you!

(Edited)

My experience is that you have about 0.5% chance of having offers accepted AND seated together if you are on seperate bookings. To ensure you are together you will need to call Air NZ and have your bookings combined into one reference.

On that sector I reckon you would need to offer at least $400 pp to have any chance of One up - happy to be proven wrong though.

Have placed a RU (from Silver) request on SYD - AKL, for myself EC to PE,, while placing a One-Up, bid $220 for wife to PE on same flight.
Needed the call centre to split our joint fares so they could process the RU and OneUp separately.
So hopefully both go through. Then of course it may be tricky to arrange seating together.

Result: Silver RU was successful (SYD - Akl). One-up bid of $260 unsuccessful - despite there being several physically empty seats on the actual flight. Maybe the failure due to the original booking being a cheap 'seat-only'.
Also on calling Airnz, was going to cost $95 for me to demote my PE to E to reseat with wife!