New to A+ Rewards
 

We want to use our A+ Rewards credits to upgrade to Business Class on a flight leaving this Saturday and our returning flight on March 10. It is our understanding that we need to call Air Tran 24 hours before our flight to redeem our credits for the upgrade. Is it worth getting up at midnight to make the call? Also, this is a cruise vacation so no cell service without paying large fees so is there a way to redeem the credits for both legs of the flight prior to leaving? We are new to this program and any help will be greatly appreciated! :)

Hi there, and welcome to our corner of Flyertalk!

You can call at 12:01 a.m. on the day before your flight leaves to obtain an upgrade with credits. (i.e. for a flight leaving any time this Saturday you can call Friday morning at 12:01). Whether you need to call that early depends on how popular upgrades are on your route. The longer routes tend to fill up quicker than most short routes, but on cruise days flights into and out of port cities can also fill up due to people preferring to upgrade for the free baggage allowance.

Unfortunately there is no way to upgrade your return flight this week. The best suggestions I can think of are as follows:

1) Have a trusted friend or family member call for you. They would need your A+ number and confirmation #(s). When you call AirTran this week you might want to ask the agent if it is OK to do this, or your friend might have to pretend to be you.

2) Bite the bullet and pay the ~$8 per minute to call from your stateroom phone.

I'm not sure if it works this way anymore, but it used to be the case that the agent would first have to take 4 of your credits and create an upgrade voucher and then apply the voucher to your ticket. If that is still the case you could ask the agent this week to "pre-create" the vouchers for your return so that you have to spend less time on the phone next week. Do know that once a voucher is created it must be used within one year, so if your return flight has no room in business class you (or whoever you let use them) would have to use the vouchers within a year.

You could try to Skype while onboard, but that is often blocked.

I hope this helps!

Thanks very much for the great information! We hadn't thought about having someone else call for us but we may try that route if they will let us. We're new to the reward program so we appreciate learning from others experiences.