When you get upgraded to First, your economy meal order gets cancelled. You can pre-order your F meal up to 20 hours ahead of scheduled departure. If later, you get what happens to be available. Hopefully for me, it'll be herring on rye next time. PS: the bathrooms for Economy are all the way in the back haha.

I'd guess it's the same IT and process as when you order in PC and get upgraded to FC - Basically, the wild west and no one knows. I've had vastly different experiences and been told wildly varying things from FAs. Does my meal follow me? Do I have to take it now that I have better choices? Will they cater the plane with a FC meal of some type for me? I've seen all of this all over the map.

If you get upgraded too late to choose a meal, the Y class selection will still get loaded, but the FA will ask you and you can get a choice of what's available in FC for people who didn't prebook, or to keep your Y offering. This happened to me just yesterday, and I just got to choose from the FC options they had.

It's possible sometimes the Y doesn't get catered, but at least from my experiences, multiple times I've had or heard the Y offering still being loaded. Once you get upgraded that late, presumably the "order" is already placed.

Yes, it may well be that you are not offered the Y order for the simple reason that it wasn't brought onboard, I don't know. It has been a long time since I was last given the choice of Y or F food.

Not long ago, I was offered the F food. Later, I noticed I got charged for the Y food. I wrote customer care, but never received a response. I let it slide since the refund would have been passed on to Amex anyway.

Not sure if this is an AS question or a Chase question. If I use my UR (from CSR) to book Alaska flights through the portal, what happens if I have to cancel -- would the value be deposited into a wallet? Or would it be some nightmare with Chase? I'm assuming the latter, but maybe one of you know for sure or from experience.

-J.

I will find out - booked the single flight

No personal experience but see the messages starting with #11 in this thread:

Canceling a trip booked with UR points

Wow, interesting it got put into the wallet from Chase points.... This seems like a nice backdoor way to transfer Chase points to AS.

Probably a really stupid question... if I book a ticket through Chase and use UR to pay for it, assuming the class is N or higher, can I apply GGUs?

-J.

They gave me the option although I didn�t use it because it was an easy upgrade

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I sometimes "cash out" UR & MR to AS wallet to be able to use my points in conjunction with a companion fare. Do it more with MR (at 1.54 CPP w biz plat) but have done it with UR (1.25cpp w CSP) as well.

Not really, because you don't get AS miles. You could just buy AS gift cards if you want AS scrip.

Why would you "cash out?" I have near 7 figure balance of Amex points and won't be using them until I find a biz class fare valued at well in excess of 1.54cpp. Though about using last night at Hilton but the conversion rate is just too low.

Of course you get AS miles, you use UR/MR to backdoor get a AS wallet credit. Using that wallet credit you buy tix which earn miles.

Biz class tix are great but I only need maybe 4 RT biz tix a year for my family. Whereas I probably buy 30+ RT domestic tix on AS. I'm certainly not paying cash for that mess.

This is supposed to be the �flame free� thread so we�ll keep it diplomatic, but it would be wise to not be so confident about pretty clear incorrect information. These tickets booked through UR, MR, or any other third party are cash bookings and earn miles as normal.

And, having a �near 7 figure� valueless-until-redeemed currency isn�t actually a plus. That 1.54 cpp rebate can also be used to book AS cash fares (for actually cheaper Amex gets a discount), on top of the elite status upgrade and miles earned though ASMP

cheers mate

With all due respect I wasn't flaming anyone or any question I was just providing my opinion just as you did -you are of course free to use your points however you like. But you seem confused about refunds. Of course all cash fares earn points - and using Amex points to purchase travel through the Amex portal is essentially just a cash ticket. But you cannot refund the cash ticket (which was the original question) and magically convert the refund into AS miles. Instead you get AS scrip in your wallet. Both the original ticket or any ticket purchased with AS scrip and any ticket purchased with cash or a credit card earn exactly the same # of AS miles when you take the flight. There is no "back door" or "side door" or any trick - it's simply a decision to blow points by buying tickets through the Amex portal. And maybe makes good sense if the cost is lower than the value of using AS miles or other potential uses of points.

The major downside in the AS program is the lack of transferrable currency - you cannot convert Amex, Chase, Cap1 or Citi points into AS miles, as was suggested in the post above.